Should a Frame TV Go Above a Fireplace?

Almost every guide answers this with heat. That advice is largely imported, and in most British homes it is answering a question you do not have.

Your fireplace probably is not a fireplace

The great majority of mantelpieces in UK housing are decorative — a surround and a hearth with no working fire behind them, kept because the room was built around it and it is the obvious place for the chimney breast to be. A decorative surround produces no heat at all, and warnings about thermal damage simply do not apply to it.

Where they do apply, they apply properly. A working solid-fuel fire, an open gas fire or a wood burner produces real heat that rises straight up the chimney breast, and electronics above it are a genuinely bad idea. If yours is lit in winter, that settles the question and the rest of this page is academic. If it has never been lit and the chimney is capped, ignore the heat argument entirely.

The real objection is your neck

A mantel forces the bottom of the television up to somewhere around chest height, which pushes the centre of the picture well above your eye line. Watch a film like that and you spend two hours with your head tilted back. That is what people actually regret, and unlike the heat argument it can be worked out in advance.

The comfort limit generally used is 15 degrees from your seated eye to the centre of the picture — the same figure that decides ordinary mounting height. Taking seated eye height as 107 cm and allowing 5 cm between the mantel shelf and the bottom of the set:

Which is a more useful answer than "don't". A mantel at 105 to 115 cm stays inside the limit at every size worth hanging there. It is the combination of a high mantel and a large screen that fails — and it fails at 2.5 m before it fails at 3 m, so how far back you sit is as much of a lever as the mantel is.

Worth noticing in that table: a 145 cm centre is exactly where a gallery would hang a picture, and a 105 cm mantel with a 55 inch set lands on it almost precisely. A low mantelpiece does not push a Frame too high. It puts it where a painting belongs.

The part that is specific to a Frame

A normal television above a fireplace is a compromise for all of its working life, because it is only ever a television. A Frame spends most of its hours in Art Mode showing a painting, and a painting wants to be high — you glance at it standing, crossing the room, from the doorway. Height costs you nothing for that.

So the question narrows usefully: how much do you actually watch it? A room where the Frame is mostly art and occasionally a film tolerates a mantel easily. A room where it is the main television every evening does not, and the table above is the one to obey.

If you are going to do it anyway

• Keep the clearance tight. Every centimetre above the mantel shelf is a centimetre of neck. Five is plenty; ten is wasteful.
• Go one size down. A 55 inch mounted comfortably beats a 65 inch mounted too high, and on a chimney breast the smaller set usually suits the proportions better anyway.
• Sit further back if you can. Half a metre of extra distance buys more than most people expect — compare the two angle columns.
• Check the chimney breast construction. They are frequently brick, sometimes boarded, and occasionally hollow where a flue has been blocked up. Find out what is behind before you drill, and see the mounting guide for the fixings each wall type needs.
• Mind the mantel when you lift. A shelf under the set makes it awkward to get a flush mount located, and it is exactly where the bottom edge gets scraped.

When the answer is simply no

A working fire below it. A mantel high enough to put the centre past 15 degrees from where you actually sit, in a room where you actually watch television. Or a chimney breast you cannot identify well enough to fix into safely.

Everything else is a preference, and the table above is how to have it with your eyes open.