Marble media walls, designed and built around the fire and the screen

A media wall built around marble asks more of its design than most fitted furniture. The stone is usually the first thing a visitor notices, so its proportions, the way its veining runs and the way it meets the joinery around it all have to be resolved before manufacture starts, not adjusted once the piece is on site.

Chester Thomas designs, draws and manufactures the oak framework, shelving and cabinetry that surround the marble in our Derbyshire workshop, and installs the finished piece. The stone itself is fabricated and fitted by a specialist stone trade, working from the dimensions and openings set out in our drawings, so the two elements arrive together as a single, coordinated composition rather than two separate jobs bolted together after the fact.

Book-matching, where two adjacent slabs are cut and turned so their veining mirrors across a joint, is one of the reasons marble reads so strongly on a media wall. Getting a book-matched panel to sit centrally, at the right scale relative to the television above it and the fireplace below, is a design decision made early, working from the room's dimensions and the client's chosen stone.

This page sets out how we approach marble media walls: where they work well, the design decisions that shape a strong result, and how the stone and the surrounding joinery are sequenced. A completed example, with dimensions and detail, is described below and set out in full on the projects page/bespoke-media-wall-solihull.

The single biggest decision on a marble media wall is scale: how wide and how tall the stone panel should be relative to the television, the fireplace and the room itself. Too small and the marble looks like an afterthought; too large and it can overwhelm a smaller room. We work through these proportions in the design stage, using the room's actual dimensions rather than a standard template.

On the Solihull project, the finished media wall runs 5.58 metres across the wall, with a book-matched marble panel set centrally around the television and fireplace, flanked by stained oak cabinetry and shelving either side. That width gave the design room to balance a substantial stone panel against joinery of real presence on both sides, rather than treating the marble as an isolated feature.

Where a fire sits beneath the television, as on the Solihull project's British Fires New Forest 1900 fireplace, the marble surround has to accommodate the fire's own opening and clearances as well as the screen above it. This is coordinated at design stage between the furniture drawings and the fireplace manufacturer's specification, so the finished stone opening lines up correctly with both elements rather than one being adjusted after the other is already fixed.

We do not offer guidance on fireplace installation or the structural and ventilation requirements around a fire opening; that is a matter for the fireplace manufacturer and installer, with our design work responding to their specified dimensions.

Chester Thomas designs the media wall as a whole, including the opening the marble sits within, but the marble itself is templated, cut and installed by a specialist stone fabricator. Sequencing matters here: our joinery openings are agreed before the stone is templated on site, so the fabricator works from confirmed dimensions rather than a moving target.

This division of work means the finished result depends on close coordination between two trades working to the same drawings, which is managed as part of our design and specification process rather than left to be resolved once manufacture is under way.