We disagreed over whether it even counted as furniture, or was just an oversized shelf thinking it was better than it was. It got resolved when somebody wheeled the console everyone’d been mocking out from underneath a wall mounted television and asked, rhetorically, where exactly router, games console, soundbar, three different remotes and a child’s Nintendo Switch dock were meant to live instead. Turns out the answer was On Top Of Itself. Case fucking closed. Most of us admitted defeat there and then. One of us still sulks about it from time to time, mostly due to embarrassment.
The thing nobody mentions before purchasing one though: TV stands aren’t about the TV.
Your TV just sits on top looking smug while the stand actually does all the work.
Swallows all your cables whole, keeps your console nice and warm from being left on standby for three hours, holds all the remotes you’re going to misplace within the next hour despite however big it claims to be.
We’ve all had the wrong one.
The flimsy floating thing that looked amazing in a showroom glossy but couldn’t hack it for five minutes once your toddler started using it as a step ladder and died after four months, RIP. The Billy With Doors so snug you needed both hands and bonus confidence they’d not snap off to open/close them so nobody ever did and within six months the shelf behind them was a genuine crime scene of old cables/two dead Freeview boxes.
What you actually want is depth. Not length, depth. You can get a TV stand that’s two rooms wide but trust me it’ll still be useless if everything you put on it is jostling for position on the same six inches of shelf space.
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When you give your electronics space to chill out the whole stand immediately stops looking like it’ll spontaneously burst into flames and starts seeming – oh dear, it appears we’ve said it – organised.
Agree to disagree on open shelves vs doors forever. Open side likes being able to see what they own, door side has toddlers, cats, or both and has accepted they’ll never see what they own again without digging through skeletons of cables they didn’t know they still had. Both of you will have bought the wrong TV stand at some point; you’re just living in different households. Stop pretending like there needs to be a winner.
What we can all agree on now, swear to god this will be the last disagreement, is if it’s going to be this big you want it to fade into your daily life not scream for attention. Nobody Instagrams their TV stand. You’ll bang into it nine times while making coffee. Get the one that outlives the toddler, halensworth’s battleaxe cat, every time you leave a device on standby till 2am by accident and the day you move house and someone inevitably bumps one end sending it down the stairs CONTENTS STILL INTACT? BUY THAT ONE.
