You There! Stop! Stop Right Now! Do Not Put That TV Over That Fireplace!

This has all been a groupthink conspiracy for the sole purpose of making your house look gross.

Photo By Zeke Ruelas

I matched with a really hot guy on Tinder. Like cartoon hot. I’ve had a crush on him for approximately ten years. I think we met a party a long time ago, but I’m not sure. Do you have people like this that you follow on social media then one day you think to yourself “WAIT DO I ACTUALLY KNOW THIS PERSON?” I’ve written a number of blog and social media posts that have gone viral in my time and I guess some of these “friends” online probably just friend requested me and I accepted either because I knew them at the time or because I thought they were hot.

This guy looks like a Ken Doll. A giant 6’3” Blond Midwestern Ken Doll. And he’s only gotten hotter over the years. Bigger, more muscular, he’s basically He-Man at this point. Unfortunately for my inner wedding planner, a few red flags were raised almost immediately when we started chatting.

Firstly, he’s one of those gays that hates other gays because he thinks he’s the only gay that feels like he doesn’t fit in with the other gays. Confused? So am I. The gay community, at least the mainstream part that everyone sees the most of, can be really exhausting and rigid. Men are inherently problematic, so when you put them altogether in social/sexual situations the toxic masculinity flows freely. I know a lot of gay guys who feel alienated. They feel not fit enough, they feel not white enough, they feel not masculine enough. The rigidity of masculine expectation, inducing the expectation that we look like Steroid Ken Dolls, can feel overwhelming for gay men.

So when I mentioned I was going to Mammoth Gay Ski Week, Tinder Guy (let’s call him Ken) immediately wrote me off as a superficial person who only socialized with gay people. Who only ski’d if it involved gay afterparties. And as someone who also feels alienated by mainstream gay culture (and all of the body dysmorphia that lies within it) I was kind of annoyed to be lumped in with a group of party boy idiot superficial gays.

I could write a whole essay about this type of alienation complex, but for now all you really need to know is this: I’m kind of half trash gay, half good gay. The reason I like the trash gays is that they’re fun. Dancing and going out is fun. So sometimes you do that with idiots. But also having conversations is fun, so most of my friends (who are both gay and straight) are writers, artists, and other freelance creatives who can hold up a conversation.

So, yeah, I wasn’t necessarily loving being written off as a dumb party whore just because I decided to go to a Gay Ski event in Mammoth. BUT THEN SOMETHING EVEN MORE OFFENSIVE HAPPENED…

When you’re a designer, a thing happens to you over and over that gets VERY TIRING. People love to say “Oh my god I need your advice!” That sounds like an invitation for advice, but what it actually is is an invitation for the other person to show you what they bought/built or were planning to buy/build so that you can say something like “THAT’S FABULOUS!” [In a problematic basic white gay voice].

It’s very rare that anyone is actually asking for your advice. They are really just asking for you to listen to them talk and validate what they already plan on doing. They want to be heard. I understand that so usually I just go along smiling and nodding, daydreaming about Ken, shirtless, doing jumping jacks in short shorts.

In this case, Ken sent me a picture of his living room. He wanted some ideas on designing a fireplace, which he was planning to add so that he would have somewhere to put the TV.

You heard that right, there was NO fireplace in this house and his plan was to ADD ONE so that he could PUT THE TV ABOVE IT. Like purposefully, building a fireplace, so that, he would, have a place, to put the TV. I don’t know how to punctuate this enough to make clear how insane I think that is.

The only thing I care about in this world is TV’s NOT being above fireplaces. It’s the hill I chose to die on years ago. I could never marry a man who DECIDED TO BUILD A FIREPLACE JUST SO HE HAD A PLACE TO PUT HIS TV LIKE SOME KIND OF DESIGN DERELICT.

There are many reasons to hate TV’s above fireplaces. Let me list a few now:

1. It is too fucking high for your goddamn neck.

2. If your fireplace opening is rectangular, then you have a rectangle-over-rectangle situation. And nobody likes that!

3. It shifts the thematic center of the room from the lovely, earthy fireplace to the gross, plastic box that is your TV.

But my most intense reason for hating TVs over fireplaces is mostly sociological/cultural/psychological:

The groupthink of people thinking THE ONLY PLACE for their TV is above the fireplace has become a plague on our society. And it’s part of a long history of design trends that normalize over time, become mainstream, become expected, then slowly because of how ubiquitous they are become DATED AND HATED a few years later.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:

Granite Countertops: In the 1990s and 2000s, granite countertops were seen as luxury. I’m not a Countertop Historian, but I’m guessing that innovations in manufacturing granite in the 1980s led to their price point decreasing, at which point vendors like Home Depot could start selling something that had previously been reserved for wealthier homeowners. Unfortunately granite started to go out of favor around 2010, so now we have all these houses filled with ugly, speckled, brown granite countertops that everyone is desperate to rip out. My parents bought a Sonoma County flip in 2012 and there was granite everywhere. By that time it was readily available, inexpensive, and on the cusp still being acceptable.

Stainless Steel Appliances: I’m not a Stainless Steel Appliances Historian, but my guess with this trend is that it was a response to a previous trend. In the 1950s through 1980s, appliances tended to be powder coated. Oftentimes they were white or black. Or in the 70s and 80s brown, like the ugly electric range my family had in Yosemite until we got a slightly less ugly white powder coated one in the early 2000s. But during that period, higher end brands like Viking and Wolf were already selling professional grade appliances with a stainless steel finish. Those trends finally started to filter down to more affordable brands until eventually EVERY kitchen appliance was stainless steel. I actually think most stainless steel appliances still look great, though the phrase “Stainless Steel Appliances” does not have nearly the real estate cache it used to.

Mahogany Cabinets: You’d be hard pressed to find someone who wants Red Ass cabinets in their kitchen these days. But many moons ago red-hued cabinets were all the rage in higher end kitchens. Again, this trend filtered down, getting more and more mainstream until it started to get difficult to find cabinets at big box stores that were anything BUT reddish, shiny abominations.

TVs Over Fireplaces: The trend to put TVs over fireplaces, like the other trends listed here, started at the high end. Why? Because it began when flat screen TVs were expensive and reserved only for rich people. You couldn’t put one of those big ass tube TVs over a fireplace because they wouldn’t fit. So only a small group of people could do the TV over fireplace thing. So it started off being seen as something aspirational. As flat TVs decreased in price, the practice has become so ubiquitous that it became a cliche and people started noticing things about how bad it was (mostly the angle being wrong and it ruining the romance of the fireplace). And so here we are today, in a limbo where people don’t know this practice is a design faux pas yet. Most designers have been sitting quietly on the sidelines waiting for you to stop putting TVs over fireplaces, but some loud mouths like me have screamed aloud in protest.

What allowed all these trends to survive is a sort of groupthink that both drives design forward and holds it back. As human beings, we like seeing things that are familiar. That makes us feel smart because we know it, because we’ve seen it before. That strokes our egos.

Here’s an example from my own life. When I stared working on Emily’s Henderson’s HGTV show thirteen years ago, I didn’t have any professional experience designing (though I had been designing spaces my whole life). I remember seeing an Eames Chair and thinking it was really cool. Looking back, I’m pretty sure I thought it was cool 1. Because it is a great, classic design and 2. It was familiar to me because it’s one of the most recognizable pieces of furniture ever created. My familiarity with it stroked my ego, made me feel knowledgable and smart. My subconscious had no idea how fucking basic I was being.

You could not pay me to have an Eames Chair in my house now because I’m so sick of seeing them after being a designer for thirteen years. Same with the Noguchi Coffee Table, which I also love but can’t stand to look at anymore.

The way we process design trends is so personal, but I do think there are some universalities too. A kernel will get planted (“Hey, is that white oak on those cabinets?”), then it turns to an idea (“Wait, do I like white oak cabinets?”), the idea turns into appreciation (“I like white oak!”), appreciation turns to a call of action (“I must put as much white oak in my house as possible!”), and the call of action becomes a rule of thumb (“White oak only for the rest of my life!”).

This form of thinking is not bad, we all need time to acclimate to our own tastes, especially as aesthetics change so rapidly. Since the early 2000s we’ve gone from:

2000-2010: Beige, tan, and fake travertine everywhere.

2010-2015: I guess everything is mid-century now?

2015-2020: Eclectic but with some deco, curvy accents!

2020-Now: Everything is a farmhouse now I guess?

It seems like trends are cycling faster and faster. And yet the trend of the TV above the fireplace refuses to die.

I hate this trend on a cellular level because it speaks to a certain kind of pessimism that makes my stomach turn. It speaks to people feeling they have no options. Or that the only option is to do something ugly and gross and literally bad for your body (specifically, your neck).

My aversion to this kind of thinking is generational. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but I grew up with parents who would immediately start listing why something was impossible the second I brought up something I wanted to try. To their credit, the boomer generation is very cautious and frugal (at least in my experience) which I think is part of how they build so much wealth over time. They’re a lot more risk averse than older millennials like me because for many of them, the system worked. Meanwhile millennials just keep getting pushed back down the financial stairs so we’re a bit more apt to be like “FUCK IT WHAT DO I HAVE TO LOSE?”

I grew up with a significant understanding of the the things that were NOT possible, which in a weird way made me into a dreamer. I don’t have realistic expectations because I got so frustrated with my parents’ addiction to practicality. That made me rebel. I don’t think I would have ever written a book or gotten to star in and create multiple TV shows without my dreamer brain, without the unrealistic expectations that I developed in opposition to my parents’ deep addiction to risk aversion.

Back to the TV thing. I hate the convention of TV’s above fireplaces because I hate the phrase “THERE WAS NOWHERE ELSE TO PUT THE TELEVISION!” What a hopeless thing to say. What you mean to say is, “I lacked the creativity and vision to figure out where to put the TV so it must go over the fireplace because I have seen that before and it is an accepted practice.”

It’s not an accepted practice. Not in this community. Not ever. Not in my name!

I think what people mean when they say they HAVE to put the TV over their fireplace is that given the windows, doors, fireplace, and pre-existing furniture, the only place they have to put the TV is above the fireplace.

But what if they’d internalized the possibility that the TV could go NOT OVER THE FIREPLACE before they bought all their furniture? Could that have saved them painting themselves into a corner with the wrong furnishings?

This brings me back to Ken. Hot, tall, glistening Ken. Getting out of a swimming pool in a tiny American Flag Speedo, water cascading off his perfectly hairless washboard abs, he looks up, gives a sweet smile, his tooth dings.

…Sorry I just hallucinated he really is hot.

Ken sent me a picture of his living room to show me where he wanted to put the fireplace and TV (on top of each other). He had bought a sectional already oriented towards the fireplace. I suggested a sectional that faced the wall so he could put the TV there. But he said his current sectional would not fit in that configuration. I suggested another sectional in the right proportions might be better. But he’d already bought the sectional so buying a new one just wasn’t an option.

Now, a few points of information. Firstly, this is LA and his house is in a very desirable location near Runyon Canyon. There’s no way it’s worth less than two million dollars on a bad day. A new fireplace is likely going to cost between $15,000-$25,000 depending on quality and finishes. So you’re telling me you can’t buy a new sofa but you’re going to cockblock the layout of this room FOR THE REST OF TIME because you bought a $2000 sofa?

His brain had already been set on putting the TV over the fireplace before he bought the house. That idea stroked his ego because it was familiar to him. So he will go with that idea. And now I will never get to marry the man of my dreams because of the whole TV thing (I’m very particular).

Something Ken said in response to me telling him I thought the TV over fireplace thing would eventually make the house look dated brought up something else I hate about the revolving door of design trends we live in - it’s really wasteful!

“The car I bought ten years ago is no longer good either. Nor are my clothes,” he said.

While it is sexy that he used the word “nor” in a text, WHAT A FUCKING DISTURBING THING TO SAY! For anyone designing a home right now, I urge you to try and make decisions that will STILL LOOK GOOD in ten years. Sometimes it feels like design is all about people just constantly re-skinning the insides and outsides of houses. While I love people being able to put their spin on their homes, that’s a lot of material going in the trash when it goes out of favor.

With my own home, I have tried to be mindful about not putting things in that will need to be torn out (unless it’s something I can give away once I’m done with it). So doing something just because it’s what feels conventional now is a short-sided, often environmentally disastrous way to go about designing a home.

Now, many of you probably have TVs over your fireplace. And you’re probably thinking “WAIT WHAT DO I DO NOW?!?”

Calm down, MA’AM! That’s why I’m here. I want to continue this conversation in a way that helps all of us grow, including me. So I’m asking for those of you out there who have a challenging fireplace layout challenge in your home to snap some pics and send them to me. My goal is to be proven wrong (ie to find out the TV really DOES need to go over the fireplace) so send me your super challenging spaces. I will select a few rooms to tackle and I will be following up in a week or two with examples of how I solved (or didn’t solve) peoples’ TV conundrums. Here is my email:

hello@orlandosoria.com

FOLLOW ALONG WHY DON’T YOU AND SEE IF I GET STUMPED!