Living rooms in Abingdon's town-centre houses around East St Helen Street and the Market Place typically centre on a chimney breast, which makes them a natural fit for a media wall built into the two flanking alcoves. These rooms often keep original coving, picture rails and sometimes a working fireplace, so the media unit has to be designed around those features and around a wall that may not be perfectly flat or square, both of which affect where cable routes and equipment bays can practically sit.
Victorian and Edwardian houses off Ock Street and Wootton Road frequently combine a chimney breast with a bay window in the same room, which limits where a large screen can be wall-mounted without competing with natural light or an awkward viewing angle from the sofa. We work these constraints out before agreeing a design, since moving a screen position after the joinery is built is a far bigger job than adjusting a drawing.
In Peachcroft, Northcourt, Dunmore and the newer developments, living rooms are generally more open-plan, with flat stud walls that suit a wider media wall spanning most of one side of the room. These houses tend to have straightforward first-fix access for cabling, and a number of clients in this part of Abingdon are looking for a media unit that also incorporates general living room storage, not just a spot for the television.
