TV unit design and media walls in Nairobi

A media wall is the piece of joinery a family looks at for several hours a day, which makes the details that go wrong unusually annoying. Cables in view. A screen slightly too high. A decoder cooking in a sealed cupboard. None of those are difficult to avoid and all three are common.

What it costs

A fitted TV or wall unit typically runs KES 75,000 to 160,000, at roughly 45 per cent margin, which makes it one of the better-value things we build. A full-wall media installation with panelling, lighting and storage is a larger job and quoted from a drawing. Market ranges reviewed September 2026, not quotations.

Screen height is the thing people get wrong

The centre of the screen should sit at roughly seated eye level, which in most Nairobi living rooms means the middle of the screen about 1.0 to 1.2 metres off the floor.

Mounted above a fireplace or high on a feature wall, a television forces everyone to watch at an upward angle, which is tiring within twenty minutes and cannot be fixed afterwards without patching the wall. It looks better in a photograph and worse in use. We will say so, and then build whichever you decide.

Measure from your actual sofa, not from standing in the room.

Cables and ventilation

Cables. A media wall should have a route from the screen position to the equipment position and out to the wall socket, sized for more cables than you currently own. Conduit during the build costs almost nothing; retrofitting it means cutting into finished joinery.

Ventilation. Decoders, consoles, amplifiers and routers all produce heat, and a sealed cupboard cooks them. Equipment failures blamed on Kenya Power are sometimes just a cabinet with no airflow. Ventilated backs, a gap at the top of the compartment, or an open shelf instead of a door, and the difference is free at the design stage.

Infrared. If the remote has to work through a door, that door needs to be glazed or acoustically vented. A solid door means getting up.

The wall behind it

In an apartment, the wall the television goes on is frequently a partition rather than structural, and a large screen plus a bracket plus a unit is a real load. That is a fixing question to settle before the design is agreed, not on the day.

Where a house has a projector instead, the unit changes completely: no screen wall, more concealed equipment storage, and a very different cable route. Tell us early.

Panelling behind

Most of the media walls we are asked for now include panelling behind the screen, and it is what makes the difference between a cabinet and a feature. The setting out has to centre on the screen rather than on the wall, which is the commonest error when the two are designed separately. See wall panelling.