The textile art in this London living room is actually a big TV cover-up

When a French family moved to the UK from the US, they fell in love with a quaint but traditional Victorian townhouse in London’s upmarket Kensington. They hired multidisciplinary practice OWN London to renovate the property and open up the narrow entrance to the front living room. But as you walked in, the first thing you saw was the TV screen on the central wall.

“They didn’t want it to be too obvious,” says OWN’s interior design manager Alícia Meireles, who had plenty of stylish solutions up her sleeve. In her previous role at Soho House, she regularly hid TVs in the club’s members’ rooms. “Hiding them gives the whole thing a little more atmosphere,” she explains.

Her initial idea was to capitalize on the client’s appreciation for texture and color by sourcing a vintage tapestry and dividing it in half. But the width of the television screen (65 inches) made everything too small for her. “The old looms that tapestries were woven on were more like 30 inches,” she explains.

The solution was to commission a piece from scratch. Meireles tapped artisans in her native Portugal and found a talented embroiderer who uses traditional techniques to create contemporary designs. Her goal was for the piece to not be too busy or overwhelming: “I wanted it to be fresh and easy to look at, without being the center of the room, even though it is the center.” The client approved a sample, and the artist, Cristina Santos, got to work, composing a pair of abstract works on painted linen that feature 17 types of colorful wool stitches. “I had no idea there were so many types of embroidery!” Meireles says. It took nearly five weeks to complete.

Back in London, a local upholsterer wrapped the embroidered fabric around two padded panels, taking care to align them perfectly. The finished pieces were framed like a typical artwork in a wooden frame, and the sides were trimmed generously enough that they were the only thing you had to touch when you opened the screens.

From the start, the idea was to place the panels in a custom unit that also had open shelves. “There are family photos and things they’ve collected, it seems more useful that way,” says Meireles. A carpenter then created an invisible mechanism where a wheel slides along the top of the shelf as the panels separate in tandem; a stop ensures they open at exactly the right point and there’s a clever soft-close function. The result is sturdy, highly functional and the envy of visitors. “It creates a wow factor when they have guests over and want to show something on TV. Not many people are used to seeing things like that,” says Meireles.