Entertainment Units: Classic Style, Contemporary Purpose
When furniture is handcrafted from solid wood, it often looks so good that it can become easy to forget that every item you buy to complement your interior décor also has a practical function. One piece of furniture that traditionally tends to stand in sharp contrast to this rule is the home entertainment unit.
While some decades have made beautiful design a priority for every piece of furniture that enters the home – resulting in some of the most gorgeous entertainment units ever built – other periods have focussed almost entirely on utility, resulting in a great compromise of style but a more practical function.
Thankfully, today anyone can purchase solid wood furniture from Woodcraft and never have to worry about forsaking beautiful design, no matter how practical a piece of furniture is built to be!
A History of Entertainment Cabinets
Television and stereo equipment for the home has enjoyed a wide-ranging history since the early radios for public sale were first introduced in the late nineteenth century. In the golden age of radio – which peaked around the 1940s – families started enjoying a wholesome tradition that’s still being experienced in many homes today!
Back in those early days of electronic home entertainment, people would gather around to enjoy listening to their favourite programs together. At these times, the object in front of them would usually be a beautifully crafted wooden radio set that looked more like a large piece of furniture than most electronics do today. These objects were not pieces of furniture built to hold an electronic device, they actually were the whole device itself, housed in an elaborate ornate wooden casing.
When the television era began to take hold in the 1960s, the communal tradition of gathering together as a family, to sit around an object that delivered entertainment to the home continued. Instead of housing a large radio, it was a tube television unit that was now cased in wood. Not unlike the earlier radio sets, televisions in this era resembled a finely crafted piece of custom solid wood furniture that people still enjoy today.
Despite the fact that the materials used to build the casing around the television increasingly became cheaper, many of the television sets in the 1980s retained the floor model design, so they still resembled a piece of furniture. This changed in the 1990s and early 2000s when component televisions and stereo equipment aimed at bringing the theatre experience into the home necessitated cheap shelving units.
So far, the 21st century has been an era obsessed with bringing the best of nostalgic design to meet contemporary technological demands, so consumers are once again interested in purchasing beautifully designed entertainment units made of solid wood to house minimalist television and stereo equipment.
One of the reasons that solid wood is such an attractive way to accommodate your home entertainment system is that you can get a new coffee table and other handcrafted wooden furniture to match your entertainment set so that it’s no longer an ostentatious feature in your living room. While there are still those who would rather house home entertainment units in cheap particle board casings, an increasing number of people are now interested in revitalizing beautiful vintage designs, which are making an impressive comeback among interior decorators.
If there’s one important lesson to take from the history of household entertainment units, its that the more a household object considers aesthetic enjoyment alongside practical function, the more likely it seems to be for people to come together to appreciate that piece of furniture. Consider replacing your entertainment unit with one that offers comfort, style, and a bonding family experience!