There's a strange style incongruity today concerning TVs (and stereo equipment, for that matter). Televisions are manufactured with futuristic, minimalistic styled black plastic cases. If you are lucky, there may be some chrome detailing, small twinkling lights, or a knob or two. However, when you get the television home, the poorer people squeeze it into a faux-woodgrained entertainment center made by Sauder, and the richer people fit it into an ornately detailed oak cabinet, complete with tooled edges resembling roman columns or colonial furniture, and paneled or leaded glass doors which obscure the TV when it is not being viewed. The black & white minimalistic style of the 80s wasn't livable then, either, and few people consider the color or shape the TV comes in when they go to Best Buy to pick one out. A coworker of mine has beautiful leather couches, matching endtables with carved wood legs and leather inserts, expensive framed prints of horses on the walls -- and then a stark, black TV stand topped by a 27" obsidian monstrosity of a television. The bits of wraught iron in his decor do offset the opaqueness of the TV, but do not obscure it.

A run through the thrift shops will give you an approximate timeframe as to the last time woodgrain was used in electronic equipment. The mid-80s, probably with yuppiedom and Don Johnson, swept the organic, "old looking" style of wood enclosures, in exchange for brushed aluminum, black plastic, and smoked-plastic covers over LEDs to completely obscure their presence when the appliance was off. Speakers as well, even when enclosed in wood, were pained solid black and dark screens covered the cones. Greys, silvers, unending gradients of black, and any of 3 colors of LEDs were mixed in multiple combinations and shapes to produce the most vacuous electronic equipment ever.

When home electronics became commonplace in the 30s and 40s, the home radio was an ornate piece of the household furniture. Artisans put style and love into crafing large cabinets out of wood, with rare veneers, patterns of grain, and ornate carvings ordaining the outsides. The comfortable wood form of the radio fit with the equally comfortable wood forms worked into the rocking chairs, curio cabinets, plant stands and picture frames. It was a part of the room, and even if it was the focus of the room, it was not different. For a time, the futuristic styles of the 50s were applied to electronics, but it was equally reflected in the rest of the furniture, and wood & wood grains were still present. The 60s and 70s brought many advances in home audio & video equipment, but there was still an organic presence in their form which lent more to them being described as furniture and less as appliances.

There is a counterpoint to this, though. Electronic equipment is a status symbol, a sign of the times, and it's design is created less for aesthetic purposes and more to define it's place within the timeline of electronic equipment. Wood is seen and "old". A TV in a wood cabinet is more on par with the old wooden radios of the 20s and appears to be more distant from the electronic era which we live in. It reflects what is considered "ultra modern" of the time. Today, industrial forms and attempts at cyberstyling are the design-theories behind most any shelftop stereo system in the stores. Ornate meters with impractical displays blink and flex with the beat, but none of them parallel any modern form of interior decoration. In a sense, they are designed to be different from the rest of the room; for thousands of years, humans have been designing comfortable furniture, and there has become a standard form for it all. Electronics, however, exist primarily within a 2" by 2" hunk of circuit board. The form around it can be as different as possible from the rest of the room, in order to draw attention to it, to demonstrate it's modernness by setting it apart from the space which it sits within. Its difference, however, creates either a hole or a peak on the congruent form of a room. People pick out their furniture and wall decorations with a common theme, color scheme, and design in mind. The electronic equipment, the entertainment focal point of most rooms today, is chosen for it's modernness and technological abilities instead of form.

Today, we make up for the failings in style of our electronic equipment by purchasing expensive boxes to hold it in, obscure its form, and make it more cooperative with the rest of the design of the room. I however, and from a fiscal standpoint you should too, have a vintage 27" console TV from the late 70s. There is a little black plastic, around the dials and knobs, but most of it is covered with a faux knotty-grained wood, and the outside cabinet is real wood, with colonial detailing carved on the vertical sections, and with faux drawer-pulls and keyhole across the bottom. It was acquired second-hand (free from my grandparents, but could be had for $30 at a thriftshop), and it has acceptable picture quality. I do have a more modern 19" TV, but it's black starkness takes away from the rest of the decoration of my apartment. Had I an apartment with white furniture, no wall coverings, and a combination CD storage-case/halogen lamp, all equally ultra-modern in style, it may be more befitting. That, however, isn't a very livable space. Today's furniture stores are full of classical, homespun styles with wood, leather, and muted earthy tones, but the main focus in most rooms, the TV or stereo, will always stick out like a sore thumb unless something is done to make it fit with the rest of the decor. If equipment designers do not design their equipment to fit with the style of the times, then we're forced to buy furniture to wrap around it and obscure it's lack of style.