The drive back to Las Vegas would take about an hour and a half I figured as I caught the fading image of the large ranch-style house in my rear-view mirror. That would give me plenty of time to reflect on the day’s events and the needs of the client who had recently purchased an impressive array of several flat screen televisions and all the beautiful audio components that life can now offer from one of the world’s foremost manufacturers of this new superior technology, Bang & Olufsen (Fashion Show Mall).

The word “slim” kept coming to my mind – today everything’s slim: slim-line telephones, slim-cut jeans and slim this and slim that – and everyone wants to be slim! I suppose that was due to the fact that all day long at this client’s home I was ruminating over how to best handle his “slim plasma televisions” with all those very slim components!

Given the basic premise that a cabinet should be “built from the inside out” (meaning that its contents will determine the size – height, width, depth etc.) then I thought we had truly come a long way from my earliest efforts to conceal a client’s TV in a new and exciting way that would allow for a very now-looking, very slim cabinet!

In my showroom in Los Angeles I was one of the first designers to ever display the “now you see it – now you don’t” idea for hiding televisions (and sometimes audio components as well) inside something other than an armoire. This was back in the early 80’s when those forward-looking clients were only too happy to embrace the concept of concealing that ugly black screen inside a cabinet that could appear to the eye as an oval bar perhaps with a piece of sculpture sitting on top – the shape and style only limited by their imaginations.

The up/down television cabinets seemed to have equal appeal to men and women – and still do. The men with their natural proclivity for gadgets with motors and remote controls (just try to separate a man from his remote control) - embraced the concept with great enthusiasm and the women fell in love with it because it was pretty and appealed to their feminine aesthetic as well as the fact that the styles and finishes available could satisfy even the most discriminating among them.

Clients have commissioned cabinets from ornate French, to exotic Moroccan and from classic Biedermeier to fabulous Oriental and on and on. Some chose to match their cabinets to existing furniture and some have preferred that they become an accent element or showpiece. But no matter the style, they are all individual – all made for the needs of the client.

The only real limiting dimension that had to be adhered to (and often still does) is the actual height of the television itself. Not that it was impossible to house a TV say bigger than a 36” – but I had to caution clients as to how such a height would affect the overall appearance of the cabinet when in the closed position. Few people would care to have a unit that gave the appearance of being “too big for its britches” as it towered over all other elements in the room. Custom motors were available for an up-charge if a client needed to raise a TV higher than the standard size, but in my experience few have done this. Also, the overall depth of the cabinet (once again determined by the depth of the TV being used) could present a problem for some.

And so I thought as I got closer to home, how lucky this new client would be with his “slim” TVs! There would be no limitations as to depth – or height – even though he was using a 50” screen. My design for his oak-paneled library would be a corner unit somewhat taller than most but fortunately it could work because of the size of the room and height of the ceiling. I would do it in oak, very traditional, to work with the existing décor. Whereas before the “slim” TVs a cabinet designed to hold a plasma of this size would have had a depth and height that would be truly unwieldy, the depth of his cabinet would only be about 15”! Now, that’s progress.

The Plasma TVs (with their 8” depths as opposed to the 24”-26” depths we used to deal with) have opened up a whole new world of greater possibilities for making the most out of the big black screen that has become such an integral part of our everyday lives. We can now hang them on the wall as we do with a piece of art and indeed we can even have them display changing images as though we were rotating pictures. And of course we can still hide them away in up/down cabinets (just like in the old days). But no matter how we choose to display or conceal them, newer and even more ingenious ways to see images on a screen are surely on the way.