The 10 Best TV Stands
Special Honors
Aki-Home Media You won’t find any of these on the discount rack, but if you’re planning upgrades to your living room, this line of stands will bring sophistication and flare. Their designs range from rustic wood to sleek metal, and many of them even include a built-in fireplace to add to the ambiance. aki-home.com
Regency Furniture This collection consists of a few product lines that are available in a variety of sizes and styles. The Harpan stands have a rich cherry-colored finish, with glass doors and a recessed area that’s ideal for a sound bar. Those looking for integrated shelving will want to consider the Harlinton models. regencyfurniture.com
Rove Concepts If minimalism's the name of your game, this company offers a line of Scandinavian-style pieces that are likely to do well in mid-century modern spaces. If you like what you see, they also offer a range of solutions for virtually every room in the house, so you shouldn't have trouble finding some matching furniture. roveconcepts.com
Editor's Notes
February 26, 2021:
While most of our choices from the updates of yesteryear continued to be stylish and practical foundations for your favourite television, we did notice a few pieces of furniture that appeared to be no longer available, and therefore needed to be replaced. The options we removed were the SauderPalladia, Leick Riley Holliday Mission and Simpli Home Cosmopolitan.
The first new choice we added was the Mecor Modern — which is available in black or white, and stands out from the crowd with its integrated LED accent lighting, which offers 12 color options and dimmability via its convenient remote control. As you might’ve gleaned from its name, it’s a modern-looking model, and one that’s capable of supporting up to 65-inch TVs.
Our second new pick, the Meble Furniture & Rugs York 02, might be an even slicker looking model than the Mecor Modern, thanks in no small part to its integrated electric fireplace, which is capable of producing both blue and red flames, and even a mixture of both. If you’re a fan of this piece, you might be interested in checking out our specialized list of electric fireplace TV stands.
Our last pick this time around, the Perlesmith Mobile TV Cart, joins its like-branded counterpart the Perlesmith Universal as an outlier on this list, in that we realized these options likely wouldn’t work for most users, but still thought they were worth including to help a small portion of our audience find just the right solution for their situation, by thinking outside the box. If you’re wondering whether this model might work for you, then maybe you should take a minute to check out our rankings for TV carts.
Now that you’ve got your TV stand picked out, all you need is a TV to sit on top of it. We’ve got several lists sorted by size, from 32-inch TVs all the way to 85-inch TVs. And, if you’ve already blown your budget on the stand, we also maintain a separate list of affordable televisions.
December 13, 2019:
One product on this list was no longer available, which is why the Innovex Oxford has been removed. We noted that in addition to unclear setup instructions, users of the Sonax Fiji were disappointed with the quality of the included hardware. We downgraded this item a bit.
In assessing the Sauder Palladia, we came across glowing reports of exquisite craftsmanship, considerable storage capacity and an effective cord management system on the back, with three separate holes for accommodating cables. Although it’s relatively affordable, many feel that it looks high-end. We moved this item up.
Since most of the options on this list are traditional pieces of furniture (entertainment centers, cabinet-style tables with shelving, etc.), we decided that our new addition should be a different type of stand. The Perlesmith Universal mounts directly to a tabletop, with an adjustable bracket that can slide up and down to change the height of the television.
Stand And Deliver
One night, as I lay down to sleep just a few spring-loaded inches off of the floor, I heard the scurry of two hungry mice.
I went through a strange phase in my life when I wanted everything to be on the floor. My mattress sat on the floor with no box spring, my books sat in vertically stacked piles on the floor, I ate on the floor and had no chairs, and my television, too, sat on the floor.
It wasn't the worst set up, but an unforeseen intruder made the situation untenable. One night, as I lay down to sleep just a few spring-loaded inches off of the floor, I heard the scurry of two hungry mice. I knew if there were two, there had to be many.
The thought of having a mouse so easily hop into bed with me disturbed me enough to elevate my mattress onto a frame, and from there I slowly climbed back to normal. First, I got some book shelves. Then, I grabbed a table and some chairs–I even started eating elevated. The last thing I eventually propped up was my television, so I went off looking for a stand.
The great thing about TV stands that are designed as TV stands–and not as coffee tables or media centers that might house a TV–is that they're built with support in mind. There isn't a stand on this list that doesn't have some kind of centralized support.
If you've ever put a TV or anything similarly heavy on a bookshelf or a coffee table without any central support, you've seen what happens. Over time, the weight of the TV causes the tabletop or shelf to bow, slowly creeping toward an inevitable break and the destruction of your stuff. The stands on our list, by contrast, come equipped with plenty of support and varying degrees of storage for the organization of all your attendant media.
Positively Negative Space
Supposedly, Mozart once said that the music is not heard in the notes, but in the spaces between the notes. Some folks say the quote belongs to Claude Debussy. Either way, there is a great deal of art theory that puts a keen focus on negative space in painting, sculpture, and music. Form, it is said, is naught but any and all space within and without itself.
Thinking about negative space–the gaps in the shape of things–when evaluating TV stands is a great place to start. After all, these units are essentially forms of sculpture. In this case, however, that negative space often has a specific purpose.
Another invaluable evaluative variable is the look of the unit.
As streaming becomes more and more the significant method by which we access our audiovisual content on the television, hard copies of films and shows are bound to become scarcer. You will find that your need for storage space will likely decline as the years progress.
For now, you still need shelving to house your DVDs, box sets, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and more. If you have a large enough collection of such media and apparatuses, you’d do well to invest in a TV stand that offers you a lot of storage. On the other hand, if you’re a minimalist–or a futurist who’s already ripped his whole library onto an external hard drive–you could get away with a smaller storage setup.
Another invaluable evaluative variable is the look of the unit. There are TV stands on this list that would look perfect in a modernist apartment with a grey couch, black granite countertops in the kitchen, and stainless steel everything, but if you put that same piece in a Victorian home decorated with all the floral flourish of the period, it might just wilt the daisies on the wallpaper.
When accounting for taste in your selection, make sure you don’t view a given TV stand in a vacuum. It may look nice enough in the pictures online, but it’s more important to picture the piece in your head right there along with the coffee table you’ve got, as well as the rest of your furniture.
All Set Up To Succeed
The first commercially available TVs that made their way into the homes of Americans after the second world war came housed in their own kind of stands. That's to say that manufacturers built each television with all its necessary parts into a simple wooden box on a quartet of legs.
These TVs offered new weight and balance restrictions, as well as accessibility to screen sizes previously useless in common households due to limited viewing angles.
Once televisions became a little lighter and a lot more ubiquitous–and particularly when Americans began to keep more than one television in each household–they were built in such a way that necessitated additional strength. Whether this was a collusory tactic between the producers of television and the makers of TV stands is more or less impossible to prove, but the latter certainly made a meal out of a newly formed market of watchers in need of support.
In the early 2000s, the old vacuum tube television began is steady descent into obsolescence, and the dawn of the HD flat screen was upon us. These TVs offered new weight and balance restrictions, as well as accessibility to screen sizes previously useless in common households due to limited viewing angles. With the new technology, you could pack a 55" television into a studio apartment, put a 180˚ half-circle of chairs around it, and not get a single complaint about picture quality.
For manufacturers, this meant a redesign of their most common TV stands to become both sturdier and more accommodating to wider televisions, resulting in the options we have laid out for you here.