An industrial TV stand looks like it should be sat in a garage. That’s why we put them in living rooms. Black metal frame, distressed wood top kind of thing. The sort of furniture that photographs mockingly, like it should be supporting a motorbike engine with its gruesome iron paws rather than twenty kids games consoles and fifty tangled charger cables. And yet we buy more every month. Call us crazy but there’s something about those chunky black steel legs wedged between your coffee table and wall that makes the television look simultaneously smaller and more expensive than it has any right to be, and it’s a magic trick we don’t want anyone deconstructing.
The shelves.
They’re everything we love and everything we hate about them.
Open shelving means the games console, the router, that box of unidentifiable remotes we’ve never used in three years lives out in the open for everyone to see like some kind of exhibit.
One of our current test products houses a single neglected Xbox 360 that we’ve left there since God knows when, maybe the Cameron years, just because dismantling it feels like confessing defeat.
Everyone pretends to like that, we’ve got a quiet consensus going that industrial furniture ages more gracefully than the oatmeal or mushroom-coloured nightmares everyone was buying back in 2019.
The scratches and chips only add to the character, not damage it. We’re not precious about our stands.
Kirromancer over by the router whispered one night that the cable management holes are almost always in the wrong place. Jammed dead centre at the back where you’d need the wingspan of a great egret to plug something in without moving the TV itself.
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And that was all it took for our détente to collapse.
It’s not a new argument, certainly, but with most TV stands it doesn’t come to full battle out loud.
Half the team think cables dangling down behind like that is part of the charm.
Industrial units are meant to look unfinished, looked like humans actually used them and were “yeah, I know it’s messy, leave it.”
The rest of us secretly cable tie all our plugs into oblivion behind the stand at midnight and cannot comprehend being in the same room as exposed wires, regarding the whole “I meant for it to look that way” excuse as nothing more than laziness masquerading as interior design theory.
We can’t even agree on how tall they should be. Too short and you feel like you’re tipping forwards to watch TV after the first episode of a movie. Too tall and the cats use them as jumping pads right onto the window ledge, no judgement if this has happened to you we’ve all been there.
The one thing we will begrudgingly admit on both sides? A good industrial stand can take a beating that a nicer one wouldn’t survive.
Permanently stack board games on the top. Let the kids treat the bottom shelf like it’s a castle. Leave your partner’s toolbox on it unsupervised for six months while they renovate the bathroom and still have a TV stand at the end of it. Try that with the Mid Century Modern you purchased off DFS once and within two weeks you’d be rubbing candle crayon into the scratch marks so you can pretend they don’t’re judging us by our TV stands now) as battle scars.
Back to square one then. We’ll just keep buying them, keep arguing about cable management holes and whether your cat will destroy it and acting like we meant all those wires to be on display until someone leans in to pick something up behind the telly and asks “what’s all that?”
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