I am designing cabinets to put in my living room as an entertainment center wall unit. In my townhome the front door opens up into the living room. The wall where the cabinets will go is set back 20" from the front door. The depth of this space is just the right size for cabinets to fit my A/V equipment in.

The difficulty I'm having is finding a proper location for the subwoofer in my sound system. I've come up with a few options.

The first is to have the cabinets on the right portion of the wall, leaving a small space to the left where the subwoofer can fit between the cabinets and the wall by the front door. This will be the easiest and most flexible, not building around the subwoofer specifically. But I'm not sure how it will look having a narrow column of empty space above the sub between the cabinets and the wall. I'm thinking of things I could use the space for, potentially some artwork, but it wouldn't be very visible from all angles. Possibly a coat rack for guests to use. Not sure how that would look though. A plant might work too.

The second option is to fill the space between the walls with cabinets and build a place inside the cabinets for the subwoofer. Building the sub inside the cabinets has quite a number of complications. To do it best, I actually would need a new sub (which I'd like to avoid) that doesn't have a side-firing port. The sub itself is front firing, which could work to have a mesh-front on the cabinet. But I would need to insulate the sub from the cabinet in order to prevent vibration transfer and there's still the problem of the sound from the side-firing port reverberating inside the cabinet. In general, there will be less complications and the sub will sound better outside of the cabinet.

A third option, which I like the least, would be to have the subwoofer out in front of the cabinet. This would allow me to fill the space with cabinets, but would leave no good place for a subwoofer in the design. I could place it in front on the side, but it would block the cabinet door from opening, wires running to it would be visible and it would extend out into the room considerably.

I attached some photos of the room and sketches of the layouts I outlined. The layouts are to scale. I just got a new 70 inch TV, which the cabinets will be built to fit.