Bespoke Media Wall Shelving

Shelving within a media wall does a different job from closed storage. It is meant to be looked at, which means the spacing between shelves, their depth and how they are lit matter as much as how sturdy they are. We treat shelf design as a composition exercise as much as a structural one.

Rhythm is the word we come back to most often. A run of evenly spaced shelves can look monotonous; deliberately varied spacing, with taller gaps for larger objects and tighter gaps for books or small display pieces, generally reads as more considered. We work this out against what you actually intend to display, rather than setting a generic spacing and asking you to fit your belongings into it afterwards.

Depth varies by function. Shelving meant for books needs to be deep enough for a full paperback or hardback without objects overhanging the edge, while a shelf intended purely for ornaments or framed photographs can be considerably shallower, which in turn makes the whole run feel lighter against the wall. We will ask what is going on each shelf before fixing a single depth across the composition.

Lighting is where open shelving earns its visual impact in the evening. A discreet LED strip set into the underside of a shelf edge throws light down onto the shelf below without a visible fitting, and can be run on a separate switch or dimmer to the room's main lighting. We plan the electrical route for this at design stage, since retrofitting lighting into finished shelving is far more disruptive than building it in from the outset.

Load is a genuinely practical consideration that gets overlooked when shelving is chosen purely on appearance. A shelf holding a run of hardback books carries considerably more weight than one holding a scattering of ornaments, and we size the shelf material and any hidden support brackets accordingly, rather than using a single standard thickness throughout.

What gets displayed shapes the whole design more than most people expect at the outset. Households built around a book collection want a different shelving rhythm from one built around ceramics, framed photography or travel objects, and we would rather understand that collection before drawing anything than propose a generic arrangement and adjust it later.

We also think about how shelving relates to the television or fireplace it sits beside. Shelving that continues the datum lines of an adjacent closed storage unit reads as one composition; shelving set at odds with those lines can look like an afterthought, however well each individual shelf is made.

The result should be a display that changes character through the day — quieter in daylight, and lifted by its own lighting once the room dims in the evening — built to hold what you actually own rather than a generic idea of what belongs on a shelf.

Part of our media walls collection