We recently bought a new media cabinet for our living room.  I was tired of the old, dark veneered, 14″-off-the-ground DIY unit we had for years.  I wanted something of furniture quality, and I wanted a style that would complement the Mid-Century modern decorating style of my house.  I looked no further than BDI, because their Venue 8649W media and storage had everything I wanted.

The Venue has curves and more curves.  You can see in the photo of my own Venue (above) that the bottom curves up at the ends and the legs swoop and curve.  What you can’t see is how the top is also curved like a surfboard.

The cabinet is available in white and in black.  I was tired of dark cabinets, so you’ll see I ordered the white.  Had I gotten the black, the two center doors would have been made of black glass, which allow the passthrough of IR remote controllers.  With my white version, all four front doors are made of wood.  Most of my components have Bluetooth or WiFi remotes, but I had to buy an IR repeater so I could control my cable box without opening the doors.

The cabinet is beautiful, but beauty is more than skin deep in this product.  The interior and the back is designed to make connecting all your equipment easy and neat.  I already loaded up everything in my cabinet, so I took a stock image of another BDI cabinet interior so you can see how the interior shelf, the bottom of the cabinet, and the back of the cabinet are ventilated to keep everything cool inside while you are marathoning shows.  What you can’t see is that the back of the center shelves have divots in the back to allow easy passage of cables from top to bottom.  The vertical divider walls also have cutouts to allow passing cables from section to section.  The back walls have cutouts to guide the cables up to the TV or down to the power or cable hookups.  The back panels also lift off so you can easily access the backs of your components for easy hookup.

Combine all this cable guidance built-in to the Venue with my Samsung TV’s little control box, and I only have a few cables to control outside of the cabinet.  I have a single cable going from the control box up through the metal stand of the TV.  Coming up into the bottom of the Venue is a single power cable to the surge protector I put inside the cabinet, the cablevision co-ax, and an Ethernet cable to my Apple TV.  A couple of cable guides keeps those cords routed down the Venue’s legs.  You can still see a few cables on the floor, but it’s not the dangling snake nest that was wadded up behind my old media cabinet.

I was able to fit the cable DVR, Blu-Ray player, Apple TV box, Samsung TV control box, a huge surge protector, a couple of Bluetooth transmitters, and two charging stations for charging Bluetooth headsets inside the center two compartments.  The two end compartments have about 12 of those DVD organizers that look like photo albums.

The body of the Venue is made of painted wood veneers, and the base is made of powder-coated steel.  The cabinet weighs a couple hundred pounds, so attaching the legs is a two-person job – unless you get white-glove delivery, like we did.  It measures 29″ tall (the same height as a dining table) x 79″ long by 20″ deep and is designed to accommodate a TV up to 85″ (up to 175 pounds).

There was actually a local brick-and-mortar store that carried some BDI furniture, but they didn’t seem to offer the Venue.  We purchased our cabinet from Modern Essentials for about $2200.00.  It’s worth every penny!

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BDI media cabinets incorporate ventilated shelves and cord control originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 26, 2018 at 11:00 am.

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