What Belongs on Either Side of a TV Stand

I always figured the space on either side of a TV stand was decoration. Filler. The bit you throw a fern in or a stack of coffee table books you never open, because the TV’s doing the real work and everything else is just there to stop the wall looking bare. Every big box furniture store sells you into that idea too, matching “TV stand sets” with two identical side cabinets that show up flat packed in one box, looking like they were designed by someone who’d never actually watched television in a room, let alone lived with the cables and consoles and dead remote batteries that come with it.

Then a customer had me hang a wall mounted unit in her living room in Wauwatosa, and she’d already bought one of those matching three piece sets to go either side of it. Cost her about four hundred bucks for the pair. I had twenty minutes spare while she found her drill bits, so I turned one of the side cabinets over just to see how it was put together, professional habit, can’t help it, and found the shelf was held on with three cam locks into particleboard so soft I could’ve pushed a screwdriver through it without much effort.

It wasn’t built to hold a router and a stack of board games, it was built to hold a candle and look good in a catalog photo for six months before the finish started chipping at the corners. That’s when it clicked for me. The space either side of a TV stand isn’t decorative at all, not really, it’s doing actual work in most houses, cable boxes, game consoles, speakers, plants that need to breathe, books somebody’s actually reading. It just gets sold to you as decoration because decoration is cheaper to build and easier to photograph.

Once I started thinking about it that way, as a load problem rather than a styling problem, the whole thing got a lot more interesting to me. What actually belongs there depends entirely on what you need it to hold, how much weight, how much heat off the back of the telly, whether it needs a door on it or an open front so the remote signal can get through. There’s no single right answer, which is honestly the fun part. So here’s what I’ve actually built, fixed, or recommended for that space, and why some of it earns its spot and some of it is just there to look nice, which is fine too, as long as you know which is which going in.

[Either Side of a TV Stand]

Media Towers and Storage Cabinets

This is the obvious one and it’s obvious for a reason. If you’ve got a cable box, a game console, a soundbar amp, or god forbid an old DVD player nobody will let you throw out, you need somewhere for it that isn’t the floor. Tall narrow storage towers either side of the stand solve that, but the construction quality swings wildly and most people never check it before buying.

Here’s what I actually look for. Flip it round, or ask the salesperson to, and check what the shelves are resting on. If it’s just four dowel pegs pushed into pre drilled holes with no adjustable cam lock backing them up, that shelf is going to sag under a receiver within about a year, I’ve seen it happen in three different customers’ houses. What you want is a proper cam and dowel joint, metal cam locks tightened into the panel, that’s what’s actually holding the shelf level under real weight, not just gravity and hope. And check the back panel. A lot of cheap towers use a 3mm hardboard back stapled on, which does nothing structurally, it’s there to stop dust getting in, that’s it. If the tower’s meant to sit against a wall anyway that’s mostly fine, but if you’re planning to pull it out to get behind it for cables, which you will, eventually, that flimsy back panel is the first thing that’s going to bow or pop off its staples.

My own solution ended up being simpler than buying retail at all. I built a pair of towers out of birch plywood with actual pocket screw joints reinforced at every shelf, about fourteen inches deep, which is enough for a PS5 lying flat plus a stack of controllers without the whole thing looking like a server rack. Took a weekend. Cost less than the flat pack version that would’ve sagged inside a year, and the joints will outlast the TV by a decade at least.

[Media Towers and Storage Cabinets]

Open Bookshelves

If storage isn’t really the problem and you’ve just got a wall that needs breaking up, open shelving does something the closed cabinets can’t, it lets light and pattern move across the space instead of stopping dead at a door front. I like these either side of a stand in rooms where the TV’s mounted rather than sitting on furniture, because the shelves end up doing visual work the stand alone can’t manage on its own.

The thing nobody tells you about open shelving units is that the vertical supports are doing almost all the actual work, not the shelves themselves. I’ve taken apart enough cheap versions to know the failure point immediately, it’s always the joint between the shelf and the upright, and on the bad ones that joint is a cam lock into a hole that’s been drilled slightly off center, so the shelf sits a hair crooked from day one and gets worse every time you load or unload a book. On a well built unit that joint is either a proper dado cut, a groove routed into the upright that the shelf actually sits inside of, or a full through tenon, and either one means the shelf is supported along its whole width, not just at two pinpoints.

Load distribution matters more here than people think, because open shelves get treated like they can hold anything, and mostly they can, until someone puts a stack of hardcover art books on the top shelf of a unit rated for paperbacks. I had a customer call me because her shelf had bowed about half an inch in the middle after eight months, turned out she had eleven Taschen books up there, easily forty pounds on a shelf that was never meant to carry it. Not a manufacturing fault, just a mismatch between what she put on it and what it was built for. Ask what the shelf’s rated to hold before you fill it, most decent manufacturers actually publish that number, and most people never once look at it.

[Open Bookshelves]

Floating Wall Shelves

Sometimes the honest answer is you don’t need floor furniture at all either side of the stand, you need floor space, because the room’s small and anything sitting on legs is going to make it feel more crowded than it already does. That’s where floating shelves come in, and I’ll be straight with you, these are the item on this list I get asked about most and the one people install worst.

A floating shelf only works if it’s fixed into something that can actually take the load, and in most American homes that means finding the studs, not the drywall. I know that sounds obvious written down, but I’ve been called out twice this year to fix shelves that pulled clean out of the wall because someone used the plastic anchors that came in the box, rated for maybe fifteen pounds, and then put a router, a stack of vinyl records, and a plant on it. The wall didn’t fail, the anchor did, there’s a difference and it matters because it means the fix isn’t a bigger shelf, it’s better hardware. A lag bolt into a stud will hold genuinely serious weight, I’ve got a floating shelf in my own hallway holding forty pounds of tools on a single sixteen inch span and it hasn’t moved a millimeter in three years, because it’s bolted into framing, not hoping the drywall does something it was never designed to do.

Either side of a TV stand, floating shelves are good for exactly one thing at a time, honestly, don’t overload them with a mix of speaker, plant, and books all at once, pick a job for each shelf. One for the soundbar’s satellite speaker, one for a plant that can handle the heat kicked off the back of the TV. Keep the load specific and they’ll hold for years. Try to make one shelf do everything and it’s the anchor that gives up first, every time.

[Floating Wall Shelves]

Speaker Pedestals and Plant Stands

I didn’t think much about pedestals until I built a pair for a customer’s floor standing speakers and realized how much better his whole system sounded once the speakers weren’t sitting directly on the floor anymore, vibration transfer is a real thing, not an audiophile myth, and a solid pedestal either side of the TV stand does more for sound quality than most people spend money chasing elsewhere.

A good speaker pedestal isn’t complicated to build but it does need mass and a flat, dead level top, because speakers hate wobble more than almost anything else. I use solid wood, usually a maple or oak slab, over particleboard here every time, not because particleboard’s automatically bad, we’ve covered that it has its place, but because pedestals benefit from real weight and stiffness rather than a lightweight honeycomb core that’ll resonate right along with the bass. If you tap the top of a pedestal and it sounds hollow, that’s your answer, it’s going to vibrate with the speaker instead of absorbing it.

Plant stands, on the other hand, are a completely different job even though they occupy the same visual slot in a room. Here the weight’s static, not vibrating, so the construction demand is lower, but drainage and moisture resistance move to the top of the list instead. I’ve seen more than one stand ruined by a plant pot sweating condensation onto an untreated wood top for a year until the finish clouded and lifted at the edges. A stand with a sealed or oiled finish, or better yet a stone or ceramic top, handles that fine. Either side of a TV stand, one heavy pedestal under a speaker and one lighter plant stand under something leafy actually reads as a matched pair from across the room, even though the two pieces are solving completely different problems up close.

[Speaker Pedestals and Plant Stands]

Baskets and Low Benches

Not everything either side of a TV stand needs to be built like it’s going to outlive you. Sometimes what the space actually wants is something soft, low, and a bit forgiving, and that’s where baskets and low benches come in, the item on this list I take least seriously from a construction standpoint and I mean that as a compliment.

A woven basket either side of the stand solves the problem nobody wants to admit they have, which is throw blankets and stray cables and the dog’s chew toys needing somewhere to disappear to fast when someone’s coming over. I’ve got two seagrass baskets doing exactly that job in my own living room, and my dad, who’s never once complimented a piece of furniture in his life that I can remember, said they were “actually pretty tidy looking” the first time he saw them, which from him is close to a standing ovation. No joints to check, no load rating to worry about, just weave density, and honestly even a loosely woven one will outlast whatever you’re storing in it before it fails.

A low bench does more work than people expect from something that looks that simple. Under load from someone actually sitting on it, the leg to seat joint matters same as anywhere else, look for a proper mortise and tenon or at minimum a corner block glued and screwed in, not just four legs bolted straight into a thin seat panel, that fails at the joint first, always. But used as a landing spot for a stack of magazines or a lamp rather than a seat, almost any reasonably built bench will do the job for years without complaint.

It’s the one item on this whole list where the construction bar is genuinely lower, and that’s fine, not everything either side of your TV needs to be engineered like it’s carrying a wardrobe.

[Baskets and Low Benches]

Final Thoughts

If there’s one thing I’d want someone to take from all this, it’s that the space either side of a TV stand isn’t one decision, it’s several small ones, and they don’t all carry the same weight, literally. A cable box and a stack of records need a joint that can actually hold up under real use. A plant needs drainage more than it needs strength. A basket needs almost nothing at all beyond a decent weave. Treating all of it like one styling problem, buy the matching three piece set and done, is how you end up with cam locks pulling out of soft board within a year, same as that customer in Wauwatosa.

What I’d actually tell you to do is work backward from what’s going in the space before you worry about what it looks like sitting there. Figure out the job first, storage, sound, greenery, overflow, then match the construction to that job. The look mostly takes care of itself once the function’s sorted, which I realize is a very joiner way of looking at a living room, but it’s served me well enough that I’m not changing my approach now. Either side of your TV stand can hold real weight and real use, it just has to be built for the specific job you’re actually asking it to do, not the job it looks like it’s doing in a catalog photo.