Dethroner Asks You: Good Tricks for Hiding HDTV and Home Theater Cruft?

Have you done any special tricks to keep your HDTV and home theater gear from taking over your whole space? I’d show you my setup, but it’s not all that special—I use a projector in the living room, so when it’s off it’s just a wall (or the screen if I am too lazy to roll it up, which I often am).

My old neighbor and friend Nick London actually built an entire loft for the back end of their apartment, leaving a place below to recess his large CRT television to give the impression of something between a fireplace and a flat-panel TV. It was a very nice use of space.

If you’ve done anything to minimum the impact of your media consumption habits—especially anything involving construction and obfuscation—I’d love to see it. I’m especially interested in figuring out a way to deal with speaker wire when you can’t get into the walls and don’t have carpet to tuck it under. (Right now I’m just pushing it up next to the baseboards and tacking it in, which I suspect is as good as it’s going to get.)

Picture via This Old House.