In need of reassurance/suggestions/advice on layout - w. pics

This room is completely unoccupied at the moment and my wife and I plan on making this our dedicated TV/HT room.

While the layout may seem straight forward I'm left feeling we're not utilizing the space to its fullest potential.

The challenge is the room has a wood burning stove which can make it quiet warm in there, but I plan to remedy this with passive ceiling ventilation, which I've seen work in other homes.

The wood stove is somewhat of a physical and really more of a psychological barrier for me to work around when planning this setup.

Acoustically the room is horrible, yet screams TV room (see pics). Nothing but hard surfaces. I'm strongly considering carpet installation down there. The room is very "cold" and doesn't seem nearly as inviting as our friends home who have the same layout with a slightly padded Berber carpet instead.

The Setup: 55" Toshiba LCD, Denon Receiver, Polk Monitor 70's, CS2, with Monitor 40 rears.


Suggested Layouts:

-The most common and obvious layout would be seating at the 4,5,6 with TV Mounted at the 2.

Drawback: Poor utilization of space. I prefer to try and get the most function out of the room as I can. While it is the dedicated TV room, with different layout we could split the rooms functions, 1/2 HT, 1/2 exercise/pool table, etc. The other drawback would be the light projected from the stove will compromise the PQ to an extent. Think of a dark room with a fire going, flashing and pulsating light. Lastly, a 55" TV 15ft away from you quickly shrinks, but I've seen similar setups and they're not too bad.

-The next layout out would be TV and Audio at the 1 or 4 positions with seating at the 2,3 or 5,6 positions. This will effectively split the room in 2 allowing us to utilize the other side for anything we want. There are however some challenges and drawbacks to this setup. TV would be protected from the light pollution from the stove.

Drawback: The major concern being the setup may be too close to the heat of the stove (specifically 1 of the tower speakers). Another issue is that one of the speakers will essentially be against the wall and firing parallel to it which may create sound issues. Stove light may effective viewing.

Its looking like the "common" setup will be what I go with just out of safety, style, ease. My main idea here was to garner suggestions and thoughts about the whole thing, perhaps someone with experience in a similar setup.

Any help will be appreciated, thanks for looking!

Here are the pics:

Rough top-down blueprint:


Pic from Postion 5 (ignore the junk):

Thanks for the replies.

The wife and I had discussed this, and this was one of our first plan, but this is before we realized the true potential of our new wood burning stove. It gets incredibly hot, and proximity is a huge issue, I would say a minimum of a 4ft radius is needed otherwise you feel like you're sitting on the beach near the equator. This would be ideal had it not been for the stove, it REALLY jacks the room's potential up.

The stove is an integral part of our heating in winter. Its both economical and aesthetically pleasing. We have oil based heat and I try to use that as little as possible. Relocation or change of this setup is unfortunately out of the equation. A projector is certainly an idea I've kicked around but its rather redundant and we're on a tight budget. Another issue is the heat at the top of the ceiling could prematurely kill the projector. I'll have to refer to industry standard operating temps to be sure though.

I appreciate the ideas and suggestions and would like to see a few more!

Thanks.