How do design sitting room (placement of plasma and fireplace)?

deadl0ck

Hi all,

I'll be building a new house next year and we have pretty much done the plans for planning permission, but I'm still not so sure about the sitting room.

Here's what we currently have:



As it stands, the plasma will have to go in the corner, but I'd prefer if we could center it on the right hand wall, or something similar like that - the reason being that I want to also be able to correctly position the surround sound.

Would it look stupid to put the open fireplace in the right/top corner ? (Yes I do want an open fireplace before someone suggests to remove it completely)

Or would it be an option to put the plasma over the fireplace ? Would there be too much heat, bearing in mind that the mantlepiece will be coming out from the wall quite a bit and will deflect quite a bit of heat out, then up ?

Anyhow, any suggestions would be welcome.....

Bluefoam

TV manufacturers won't say yes or no about putting TV over fireplace, but you can take heat readings and check them against manufactures specs...

You should be able to deflect the heat so that it doesn't effect the TV.

You will have to feed your power, sat/cable, scart etc.. through the chimney breast and make sure you can add cables for future accessories.

This means you may need to flu the fire seperatley.

There are lots of arguements about TV's over the fireplace, but each is in its own right a point of focus/centre piece, so why not have them both in the same space.

Idleater

I have a similar layout of room to yourself and I have the LCD to the left of the fireplace. It depends on the light coming in to your room. If the sun shines in the large glass doors then the RHS of the fireplace would be better, otherwise if it shines in through the windows the LHS would be better.

My reasoning was
1) the heat from the fireplace
2) elevated placement means creaky neck.
3) looking into the light of the fire over a prolonged period can cause eyestrain.
4) reflections on the screen from sun or other light also cause eyestrain.

L.

ThomasH

Or would it be an option to put the plasma over the fireplace ? Would there be too much heat, bearing in mind that the mantlepiece will be coming out from the wall quite a bit and will deflect quite a bit of heat out, then up ?

We stayed over in a hotel while on holidays and the plasma was over the fireplace (which was a closed one). It looked good and I must say it was very enoyable watching movies as well as having a warm fire.

Although can't remember name of hotel I'd say it is duable but don't take my word for it

I'm 2/3 of the way through my build and the way I plan to do this is to build a false wall at one end of the living room with a cutout in it for the LCD screen and openings for the DVD player etc below the screen.

Doing it this way means that I can have a clean "enterprise wall" with all the cables etc hidden in the store room behind.

You could do something similar on the LHS of the fireplace.