5 Inspiring Ideas For Decorating The Area Around Your Mounted Television

Televisions provide a huge amount of entertainment in most homes. These video screens account for 5.5 hours per day of leisure time, according to U.S. News and World Report, making for a few hugely important decisions when it comes to replacing or reimagining the entertainment space in any home.

In addition to the TV itself, though, it's important for homeowners to think about the wall space that surrounds the unit. A mounted television set brings this issue to the forefront in a unique way. Instead of purchasing (or perhaps building) a television stand to cater to the TV set and any boxes, remotes, disks, and gaming consoles that operate alongside the screen, you'll have to incorporate innovative decorative elements to make the wall come alive rather than appear like a blank space behind the TV.

Consider these five design options for a new look and feel in this space featuring a mounted TV.

An accent wall can be the perfect way to make a big, bold statement with the space around your mounted television. Accent walls are often included in bedrooms and other living spaces to provide a direct contrast to the remaining theme elements of the space (perhaps in coordination with the color wheel).

Colored accent walls can be formed in many different ways, according to ExtraSpace Storage. The key element is to create a wall (the one behind your mounted television screen) that contrasts in a significant way with the rest of the room. The simplest of accent walls make use of a competing or complementary color as a uniform color choice. These are easy to accomplish and make a big difference in the style of the room with little effort. 

Other, more in-depth accent additions might use multiple colors or a painting design that allows the wall to stand out boldly against simpler tones and patterns in the rest of the room.

Media comes in many forms, and one of the most impactful ways to showcase and enjoy a variety of different entertainment mediums is through the creation of a customized bookcase. IKEA, for example, offers some simple designs that make installing bookcase options around a mounted TV a straightforward task.

Similarly, making use of different IKEA pieces as the foundation of a custom build (for shelving units or bookcases, desks, and more) has become a typical practice for design-savvy and frugal homeowners looking for something interesting and uniquely valuable in their own homes.

Built-in bookcases that complement your TV wall, not only allow you to showcase your favorite media titles, but they can also help you to declutter other areas of the home that have perhaps become overrun with aging bookshelves and the books they hold. As HGTV notes, bookcases are definitely for more than displaying books. They're an open space you can design with collectibles, photos, cards, and other meaningful items.

Floating or bracketed shelves are another option for homeowners looking to create a statement piece around their mounted television. Shelves can be loud and fully stocked (as in the bookcase layout), or minimalistic and simple. This second approach gives you the ability to place a few key decorative elements around the TV for huge impact with a small budget and often a very light workload.

TV wall mount brand Sanus notes that floating shelves, in particular, are valuable in reducing what it calls the black-box effect of a singular television screen mounted on an otherwise sparse wall.

A minimalist approach to the decorative flair around your TV might be the perfect complement to your style and the environment of the room you enjoy your viewing habits in. These types of shelves are often light and mobile as well, meaning a redesign to add a new shelf or a change to the layout alongside a future (much larger) mounted TV upgrade is easy to facilitate.

A statement art piece that sits behind the seating area across from your mounted TV is one design way to go, as its grand size can balance out an especially large television in a room. From nature to sports to a cityscape, there are many ways to go when it comes to wall murals today.

As for sports, a dedicated entertainment room featuring a large mounted TV might be purpose-built to facilitate maximum enjoyment of watching the big game every Sunday or routine enjoyment of hockey or baseball events throughout the week. Memorabilia and sports images are a great addition to entertainment spaces that are used heavily to watch and enjoy sporting events. 

Whether you're angling to incorporate iconic images and sporting decorations from your favorite sport or team, or simply want to bring in some of your favorite artwork from other genres (as a lover of impressionism or abstraction, for instance), Jessica Devlin Design notes that placing artwork in relation to a television is all about managing the lines created in the process.

Instead of modern artwork or sports memorabilia, incorporating family photos around your mounted TV can provide a similar design function while focusing on something a little closer to home. This said, while family photos are a great option in nearly any part of the home, if they aren't used carefully, they can easily make a room, shelf, or wall look cluttered and messy, according to Home Made Lovely. 

Family photographs make for a space that's uniquely personalized and homely, and they can help you showcase cherished loved ones and moments of triumph in the history of your family story more broadly. A few well-placed family pictures make a room instantly more personal and intimate.

Per Frame It Easy, when creating a photo gallery, you'll want to keep the spacing between your frames uniform, and you'll need to measure everything out first before you start to hang your pictures. As Home Made Lovely notes, you'll also want to make use of frame color, with one option being to use canvas prints in black and white to maintain a minimalistic and modern vibe for the space.