Hi Caroline, wow, that is a challenging space! When are you doing your "four seasons" room? I'm just wondering because it seems like the things you want and your DH has agreed to are a fairly large undertaking, in time, expense, and big furniture that might be difficult to repurpose. What will this space become when you have the new TV/company space? Also, if I may ask, what region of the country do you live in? I agree with you about not wanting the open storage. The picture you posted with those open shelves is my least favorite, although I realize you were really looking at the bottom cabinets. The wood against that green wall in that picture is unattractive, in my personal opinion. Also, it's really, really hard to pull off open shelving or even open bookshelves unless you're super organized and have some very nice things to display; otherwise it just looks messy and cluttered. The white unit is by far my favorite, because it looks the least "heavy." I know your DH wants hickory, but, and this is just my personal opinion, a long room like that with wood floors and then a massive wood wall structure just looks very unbalanced to me. The hugeness of the entertainment center and TV just completely dominate the room. The white one lightens up the whole room and just automatically looks cleaner and not like a mess. I would hope that you're not planning to completely fill every inch of shelf space; if you can balance the space on either side of the TV, that would be nice. My understanding is that you want the bottom cabinets to hold over-sized photo albums and photography equipment? That seems like a great idea! I think the whole concept is solid. I would just urge you to think about lighter colors, and using white areas, i.e. not filling all the space, giving it a light, airy look to counter balance the room both spatially and color wise and not make one end "wood heavy." Also, think about what you want that room to be when it's no longer the TV lounge. Maybe a kind of library/quiet space/conversation room? Perhaps where the TV was you could do a small gallery wall-or one big work of art, with a few smaller framed pieces on the shelves, breaking up the space between the stacks. Just some thoughts.

Think about furniture placement. You may not want to put the fireplace centered in the middle of the wall, as it appears your furniture won't be able to be centered in front of it. That bump with the 4' opening is for a door, I assume? Where does the door lead? You will need to leave that whole area along the stairs/living room wall open for a walkway (leaving 42-48" open along the wall would be ideal, IMO) to walk through the living room to the door. If you center the fireplace on the wall, the furniture facing it will need to be off center to account for the walkway. The window and door bump outs are going to be awkward to furnish/decorate around, I'm afraid. It looks like the fireplace wall is just under 17', but after accounting for leaving open space for the walkway, that gives you just under 13' wide of space to work with for arranging furniture in the 10' area (the length of wall with the 3 windows) in front of the fireplace. Or are you planning to put your couch/es in the area where the room widens (the second trio of bump out windows)? If so, how are you going to use the ~13x10' area in front of the fireplace?

You know what? You have the wrong accent wall! Can you repaint that side wall to match the rest of the room and make your TV wall an accent wall? Same color, different wall. You could also arrange some of those art works on the new accent wall . . . or not. Here's a setup that camouflages the width with both a dark accent wall and the floating shelves. I do think a wood piece below TV on an accent wall might look amazing. Sometimes some great pieces show up on Craigslist if you search for "sideboard" "console" "buffet.

@mcarroll16 thats a good point, no I dont necessarily need more seating. I will definitely consider this! I saw this photo on Pinterest that I really liked but we dont have the resources to do something similar right now so I think I automatically thought of a trunk. But thats a good point if I had something longer and just as high, it might actually be more storage.