Last month Apartment Therapy featured a great roundup of easels as home decor, but this has taken it one step further. Check out this use of an easel as a television stand in what we think is a strange but interesting move...
The home of designer Vicente Wolf is featured in Metropolitan Home in a full home tour. Among an inspiring mix of rustic, traditional and contemporary furniture Vicente has propped up a mid-sized flat screen television on an easel. We love the look and the way that it incorporates an electronic that can easily be a design detriment.
We think the idea of the propping up of television imagery as art is compelling and perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek. Nevertheless, we love the way that this incorporates the piece into the rest of the home. Check out more images in the home tour here.
Images: Vicente Wolf
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I love it. Nicely done. Although I feel kind of guilty elevating my flat screen (which I don't have) to the position of art. There's definitly a lot that goes into the making of every tv show (design wise as well). I dont know.
Guiltily love it!
Now that RH is making them, I'm guessing this will become another fad of fairly short duration.
I can see how practical this can be--eliminating the need to wall mount a TV, the portability, etc, but it just feels weird. From being an active participant in the creation or viewing of art on an easel, to being the passive blank slate onto which the TV projects its images is just...weird.
Fabuloso.
Surprisingly, I kinda like it.
After reading these posts, I have to say ... "Get over yourselves". We all appreciate art. We also appreciate living with technology. Note: The use of the wheel has evolved quite nicely.
Looks like tempting fate to me. Can you say *crash*?
I worry that the cords would be even more visible and in the way like this.
As a painter, that easel is so pristine that the thought that the TV was supposed to look like art didn't even occur to me. I think it looks pretty good.
Great idea, especially if you paint the easel. Certainly low key. And we wouldn't be worrying about mixing up TV with art is we just built a stand and then used it for art. Sturdy easels can be used to display so many things.
I´m sort of with KidMoe on this... it just feels weird somehow...
http://notyourgoddess.blogspot.com/
Love it, but would like to see a more practical picture. One with a dozen or so cords dangling from the frame to the receptacle hidden from view.
too much analyzing folks. it's a tv on an easel. like it or don't.
I love it.
Upon moving to Korea last month, my SO's Lenovo slate's dock died. It was hideous anyway, and the slate functions just fine without it, but he missed being able to sit it upright.
Solution: a tabletop easel. It even tilts the screen about the same amount as a laptop screen. It's an older model and uses a stylus, so when he's poking at it with the stylus it even looks like he's doing something artistic.
Clever idea if you're lacking in wall space. But, doesn't an easel have to be tilted back to balance? (Particularly if it's holding a heavy TV.) A screen angled toward the ceiling doesn't seem ideal.
Fine except it looks much too high and (visually) off balance. And yeah, a wireless TV? You could run the wires down one leg to make it look decent in real life, but there are no wires here at all!
Having a cable box, DVD or Blu-Ray player, etc. would make this set-up more complicated than a normal TV stand.
A word of caution here.
I paint and hav e arather large Best easel in my studio. The hardware to tighten everything in place can and does slip. They can also become stripped over time.
If you are considering using an artist easel for this, make sure its a heavy duty one and please reinforce all you settings perhaps with screws into the wood vice relying on the knobs on the easel itself.
A nice flat panel on the floor broken is not a happy thing.
If you have a well designed entertainment system there should be only two cords on the TV. Two cords can easily be hidden from view with this setup. Attach them to the back of the supporting legs, and the only visible part should be the small distance from the feet of the easel to the leg of the shelving unit. Even that can be hidden with molding at the baseboards of the wall. A lot easier to hide cords like this than to have a TV mounted on the wall. Then, your only options is to have cords running down the wall, or run them in the wall... and that's not an option for most renters.
As far as TV as art. Beyond film, there were many well known artists who did video art... Salvatore Dali for example, so the idea isn't really that out there. Film is art, people.
It's an interesting idea.
The anti-television hypocrisy will never die, Megnez. We must allow people their rants against the boob tube, it allows them signal their superiority.
You needn't cite examples of "real" artists who dabbled in video to defend the medium-- I can think of contemporary television shows that far eclipse anything Salvatore Dali ever touched. The Sopranos, for instance.
(But then again, I don't think of a wooden easel as a touchstone of "art" in the first place. I think of it only as a device to support something.)
shirley-temple-of-doom: Some easels, like the one this is based on, are vertical. It is a regular studio easel designed for larger paintings and to be more mobile. I find the idea intriguing since with the right easel not only do you get to mimic a wall mount without the wall damage, but you gain the ability to move,lower or raise the set to different situations (assuming you used an easel with the proper hardware to do so safely) and gain some architectural depth.
There should also be no fear of it falling if you are smart about it. You wouldn't/shouldn't simply set it on the stand. The smartest thing would be to treat it like a wall mount. Buy an appropriate vesa mount and some plywood. Screw and glue the plywood to the easel and then attach the wall mount to the plywood and then finally the TV. At that point as long as it isn't top heavy or unbalanced it won't fall
I also think it would be interesting and functional to use some heavy weight picture wire and some plywood to create a couple tiers of hanging shelving below the easels shelf for equipment. You could just build it off of the base, but I like the idea of hanging it to further push that minimal wall mount look.
i prefer to have the ability to hide the tv behind something. looks like you wouldn't even be able to toss something over it
We've had our TV on an easel for quite a few years now. we bought the easel specifically for this purpose (and made it look used). It's meant for very large & heavy canvases. After we measured for the correct viewing height we screwed it all together so it couldn't move up and down anymore. We attached a regular wall TV bracket so we knew it would sit correctly and flat for viewing.
It's very sturdy and is not falling anywhere. We didn't have a place to "hide" the TV so this is the next best thing. Sometimes we have a DVD of our photos (or some art) playing so it becomes a frame.
We love it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/karandash/2678864167/in/set-72157606713424529/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/karandash/2678863995/in/set-72157606713424529/
You could throw a seemingly used cloth over the "painting" just like an artist would use to cover a painting that is not ready for viewing if you want to hide it.