The party wall run, built in

The top band, in numbers

• *Updated 2026-08-30: this table showed 57 for both ends' height until now — stale on the entertainment side (it dropped to 500 a while ago, see the media end page) and just resolved on the laundry side today, to match. The whole laundry column above is rewritten to match the current design — see the laundry & pantry end page and ADR 0005 for the full detail behind it.
• The TV sets the band height, not taste. An 85″ tops out at 174 and the cabinet underside is at 191 — 17 cm of clearance. Drop the band any lower and the screen touches it.
• The two ends are 1.6 cm apart across 7.1 m, so the band reads as eight identical doors even though it is two different runs.
• Going to the ceiling rules out lift-up doors. There is nowhere for a flap to lift into, so these are side-hung pairs. A single 73-wide door would swing that far into the room at head height, which is worse.

• The verticals align top and bottom but not in the middle. Cabinets and drawers both land at 75, 150 and 225; the middle bays sit at 64, 258, 301 and 322 because the TV and the wine decide those. Worth treating as a deliberate position — a regular top, a regular bottom, and a middle driven by what goes in it — rather than something to try and reconcile. Forcing the top band to match the middle would mean a 192-wide cabinet.

Depth — the window changes the answer

• I was wrong to recommend 75, and the window is why. It starts 41 cm off the party wall, so a 75-deep run would box in 34 cm of it — on the wall that faces the garden, in the corner that gets the light. That is not a trade worth making for drawer capacity.
• 41 costs you the second row of board games and almost nothing else. Wine at 35, the TV bracket, the Sonos Arc, a 20 L keg at 40, network switches, lego and consoles all fit inside 41. Capacity goes from 80 boxes to 40.
• The one real casualty is the robot vac dock, which wants about 44. Options: give that single bay 51 and step it at the tech cupboard, where the pier already creates a step; or dock the vac elsewhere.
• And it hands back 1.25 m² of floor against 75. In a room where the kitchen prep space is already tight, that is not nothing — the build-in drops from 17% of the room to about 8%.

So: 41, with one step

• Entertainment run at 41, stopping clean at the window reveal. The garden corner stays open and the run reads as a shallow wall of joinery rather than a projecting block.
• Step to 51 at the tech cupboard if the robot vac stays there — that is 41 cm of the run, right beside the 51 pier, so the step lands exactly where the building already steps. It will read as deliberate.
• Laundry end stays at 75, fixed by the washer. So the pier now separates a 41 run from a 75 run, with a 34 step at the point where the ceiling drops and the original rear wall stood. Three changes on one line — that is a strong break, not a mistake.
• What you give up is the single unbroken plane across 7.10 m. What you get is the window, a metre and a quarter of floor, and a room that does not feel lined on one side.
• Update: the entertainment run's floor-level plinth — drawers, wine column, and overflow storage column together — is a deliberate exception to the 41. It was going to match the laundry end at 75, but an immovable wall rules that out; a follow-up measurement found the wall on the right (pier side) only allows 50, and it isn't equal on the window side. So the plinth steps out to 50, not 75, and everything above 480 AFF stays at 41. See the media end page for the detail and the side profile. The "step to 51 at the tech cupboard for the robot vac" line above is also now moot — the robot vac was dropped from that design.

One cabinet may not be a cabinet

• The heating work needs a fan coil high in this room — it carries the peak heating load that the underfloor cannot, and does the cooling. It has nowhere obvious to go once this wall runs to the ceiling.
• The neat answer is to give it one of the eight top cabinets. It is already a box at the right height, it hides the unit behind a grille, and the door line stays unbroken. It costs one cabinet of storage and needs a condensate drain and a pipe route planned into the carcass.
• Which one depends on where the pipes come from, so it is worth asking the heating installer before the joinery is cut rather than after.

The 85″ fits — here is what it costs

• An 85″ panel is 188 × 106. In a 192 bay it fits, and the dashed outline shows it against the 75″ you have now.
• It eats the display bay. At 75″ that bay is 84 wide; at 85″ it drops to 62. That is the whole trade, and it is worth settling before anything is cut.

Why the TV cannot go further right

• It has moved as far as it can. To its right the bar, wine and tech need 109 cm plus dividers, and that fixes where the TV bay ends.
• With an 85″ the TV centre lands 22 cm left of the wall centre; with a 75″ it is 11 cm left. Centring it means losing one of the three bays on the right — and the tech cupboard cannot move, because that is where the network cable arrives.
• The narrow wine bay reads as a divider rather than a mass, so it should look more balanced than the numbers suggest.

The split lands on a real line

• The pier you are building around, the original rear wall and the bulkhead all sit at the same point, 367 from the garden end. The break between the two runs is where the building already changes.
• The top band of cabinets runs at 191 across both halves, so the whole 7.1 m reads as one line even though the two ends do different jobs.

Bay widths as drawn

Heights, and why

• Kickboard 10, drawers 38, TV bottom at 68. The drawer height is what sets the TV height — a second row would push the TV up about 25 cm and leave nowhere for the soundbar.
• Sonos Arc below the TV, in the 53–62 band. It is 114 wide, comfortable in a 192 bay. Below is right: the up-firing drivers want the ceiling, and above the TV inverts the height channels.
• TV centre at 112 for the 75″, 121 for an 85″. Seated eye height is around 105–110, so both read comfortable rather than craned.
• Cabinets and drawers align. Four doored cabinets on top and four drawers below, both 73 wide, both stopping at the wine. The verticals line up all the way from floor to ceiling.
• An 85″ leaves 17 cm between the top of the screen and the underside of the cabinets. Enough, but it is the tightest gap on the wall.

The right-hand end

• Wine floor to ceiling, two bottles across in a 19 cm bay — roughly 44 bottles cork-out. It needs about 35 cm of depth, the deepest single requirement on this run.
• Tech cupboard 41 wide, full height, network cable dropping in from the ceiling where it already runs. Switches get hot in a closed ply box — plan a vent or a slatted door now.
• Robot vac dock below it, with the kickboard cut away so it can drive in. That is the only break in the kickboard along the whole 7.1 m.
• Bar bay: kegs at the bottom with 53 cm clear, which takes the 20 L; drop leaf hinged at 105 for a serving surface; whisky on open shelves above.

The laundry end, as briefed

• Four columns into 295: pantry 84, appliance 88, cleaning 48, washer 66. Reading left to right that is food → cleaning, exactly the split you asked for — and it puts the pantry at the end nearest the kitchen.
• The top cabinets very nearly match. Four across each end: 73.1 on the entertainment side, 71.5 here. A 1.6 cm difference across 7.1 m that nobody will ever see, so the top band reads as eight identical doors.
• Washer on the floor with a false kickboard across its front and a door in front of the machine, then a double-door cabinet from 95 up to the top band — 96 cm of it.

That cabinet should be the drying cabinet

• Your brief filled the space above the washer, which is where I had put the drying rail — so drying was homeless again. Except the cabinet you have specified is exactly the right box for it: doors that close, directly over the machine, 66 wide and 75 deep.
• It solves the airer in the middle of the living area without costing a single centimetre of wall. It wants a rail, slatted shelves, and either an extract or a small dehumidifier — otherwise you are venting damp into the main room.
• Honest limit: at 96 cm high it takes shirts on hangers and flat drying. Trousers and dresses at full length will not clear.

The real machine sizes

• Turning the Kenwood costs 10 cm. Facing forward it is 29.5 wide; sideways it is 39.5. The three machines go from 62.7 to 72.7, and in an 88 bay that drops the gaps from 6.3 to 3.8 each.
• 3.8 is enough between machines but tight at the ends — awkward to clean behind, and not much room for the Profitec’s portafilter handle to swing.
• It also kills the 78 option. That would leave 1.3 cm of gaps, so the pantry can no longer be widened to 94 by shrinking this bay.
• The fix, if you want it: take 6 cm off the pantry. An appliance bay at 94 with a 78 pantry restores 5.3 cm gaps — comfortable again, and the pantry is still wider than the cleaning column.

• Depth actually improves. Sideways the Kenwood is only 29.5 deep instead of 39.5, so the Profitec at 41 is now clearly the deepest thing on the worktop.
• Height still a non-issue — 38.5 tallest against 101 clear, with room to raise the Kenwood’s head and lift the Profitec’s tank out.
• Power. The Profitec draws around 1400 W and the Kenwood is similar. That bay wants a properly rated spur, not a shared socket.

Where did the stick vac go?

• It had its own bay in your sketch and this brief does not mention it. The cleaning column at 48 wide can take a wall dock in a full-height slot, but not if it is all fixed shelves — worth deciding now, because it needs a socket.

The washer just turns

• It stays where it is and rotates 90° — facing into the room, loadable from the kitchen side. The supply and waste do not move, which takes the most expensive unknown off this wall.

Now settled

• Sized for an 85″. The TV bay stays at 192 and the display bay at 62. The 75″ you have now sits in it with the 85″ outline shown around it, so the carcass never needs touching again.
• One coffee setup, and it lives here. Machine, grinder and Kenwood all move to this nook — which hands the kitchen prep run back around half a metre of worktop, useful given the kitchen layout is the next thing to draw.
• The false wall goes. Only the 51-deep pier is permanent now, so nothing forces the run deeper than you want it. That leaves depth as a free choice between 51 and 75 rather than something the building dictates.

Still to pin down

• Depth — 41 for the entertainment run, 75 at the laundry end, with a possible 51 step at the tech cupboard for the vac dock. Confirm the 41 with a tape before anything is cut.
• Kenwood model — Chef XL at 29.5 or standard Chef at 24.
• Stick vac — a full-height slot in the cleaning column, and it needs a socket.
• Appliance bay at 88 or 94 — 88 as drawn is snug with the Kenwood turned; 94 is comfortable but takes the pantry to 78.

Your sketches

Entertainment end.

Laundry and pantry end.