Motorized TV lift in cabinet

[ewand]

hi all - my better half has decided she'd like our living room to be redesigned, and has engaged the services of a friend who is an interior designer. Now the designer has suggested coming up with a mechanism to hide the TV (a 55" OLED LG) so it is not so dominant in the room (in her words).

Has anyone got experience of this kind of thing for a main living room, rather than a cabinet at the end of the bed or in an RV etc?

A bit of searching online and it looks like this kind of thing might be feasible - VEVOR 800mm Motorised Tv Lift With Mount Bracket & Wireless Controller For 26"-60" | VEVOR UK

We'll have a cabinet custom made to fit an alcove in the room and there are a variety of gotchas I can see right away - I'd imagine the mechanism, bracket and TV panel are going to be 200mm deep (or more), meaning if the cabinet is going to be big enough to handle an AV amp, Bluray, Xbox etc, then it'll be pretty deep. And the ideal would be to have the screen be mounted so it can be angled into the room rather than be flat against the wall, which this thing won't do without adding more bracketry to it.

I'm starting to think having the TV wall mounted so it can at least be pushed flat back against the wall could be a suitable alternative...

 

[Deleted member 134693]

6EB59C5C-0C06-47B8-9A8B-15A82D734E7F by Mark Turner, on Flickr

 

[Deleted member 134693]

This is what we had installed in our lounge approx 18 months ago.

Obviously you'd need the opposite mechanism to push it up rather than lower it down....

 

[ewand]

Thanks for the response! I've a feeling I might just go with TV on a bracket, as the size of unit to accommodate it would be so big, it would dominate the room even more than a big screen does ...

 

[KelvinS1965]

I put one in my living room about 5-6 years ago. I have an acoustically transparent projector screen behind my TV so I lower the TV when I want to watch on the projector: The TV lift was much cheaper than an acoustically transparent drop down screen.

You need to buy the right size/drop to allow for the TV's own height so that it fully disappears from view when not in use.

There are more details in my build thread, but I can't remember what page:
When Worlds collide: The dedicated living room cinema (Updated May 2020)

If you look carefully you can see the slot cut in the oak top for the TV to drop into:

Then when I'm watching a film, or in your case when the TV is off (I usually pull out black side curtains, etc to further darken the room, but this shows the TV slot better):

This was during the build:

I can't remember the make of mine, but I got it off eBay/Amazon after I did some research on the different brands. I can have a look into it later this week if needed. I have a feeling the brand name began with 'T' though I could be wrong.

Good luck.

 

[ewand]

Thanks for the response! I've a feeling I might just go with TV on a bracket, as the size of unit to accommodate it would be so big, it would dominate the room even more than a big screen does ...

An update for anyone that's interested - since the proposed location for a unit to swallow the screen wasn't wide enough to have amp etc alongside, it would have ended up looking like a huge block of wood, so we went for a Vogels 546 Thin bracket in the end and am very pleased with it. Got it from Vogels Thin 546 (Black) for about £190 using a discount code from Richer Sounds.

The TV is almost flush with the wall so when pushed back it's way less intrusive.

The media kit is going into one of two matching storage units on either side of the fireplace, both of which are reassuringly expensive but at least they were open to customizing things. I've specced it with a central door, am getting them to cut louvres in the shelves and to leave the back open on the two side compartments...

Plutonium media unit 2 - Elements

www.charlottejamesedinburgh.com

I've a feeling there's going to be a good amount of swearing to get everything installed but I will come back and report progress when it's done, since finding the right storage seems to be 10x harder than finding the right AV gear

 

[ewand]

Sitrep.

Charlotte James makes semi-bespoke furniture and deals only with retailers or designers / other professionals, so you don't just rock up and order online. We went through the designer who'd come up with the living room scheme (at predictably serious expense, of course) and they customized the units to my spec.

The main media unit had open backs on the right and left cupboards, a pop-out door covering the middle shelves and slots cut in the bottom to help airflow. They said the shelves in the main media unit had to be fixed (to give it extra strength, offsetting the fact that the back is open) so I decided on no shelves on the LH side (where the amp goes), so I know there's enough clearance.

The install went OK - the only thing I hadn't taken into consideration when sizing the cupboards was the internal hinges of the doors rob quite a bit of width and go back a fair way. The amp (a Denon AVR-X2200W) needs to sit behind the hinge, which is fine as there's enough depth for it to sit back inside the cabinet.

I have a rarely-used Humax Freesat box which connects to sat cables that just come through the wall, and there wasn't enough length on them for the box to sit in the right side, and since the middle section doesn't have any cutouts for cabling etc, that meant it had to sit on top of the amp. I grabbed a couple of stiff plastic boxes (old 3.5" floppy disk boxes - knew they would come in handy!) and have it suspended there for now. At some point, I might take one of the removable shelves out of the other unit we bought (to make a pair), and install that into the media one.

Anyway, enough talking - some pictures - nearly finished except for some curtain froofing to do:

(that basket underneath the amp is probably in exactly the wrong place from a cooling perspective - but it helps to hide the rats nest of cables that you can now see when sitting on the sofa, but which were out of sight with the old Phoenix AV3 unit we had). I've tried to tidy them up as much as possible and have removed devices and cables that are no longer required, but there's only so much you can do...