Sky+ HD designer boxes shown off in picture gallery

Is your Sky+ box looking a little drab? Trade it in for a trendier model! Check out our gallery of designer Sky+ HD boxes.

Luke Westaway

Luke Westaway is a senior editor at CNET and writer/ presenter of Adventures in Tech, a thrilling gadget show produced in our London office. Luke's focus is on keeping you in the loop with a mix of video, features, expert opinion and analysis.

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Luke Westaway

Nov. 18, 2011 9:34 a.m. PT

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Sky+ HD is a rather neat invention, but goodness those grey boxes look drab. Give your living room the sprucing up it needs by chucking your boring old box away and opting for one of these designer models.

Click through the photos above to ogle the limited edition boxes in all their colourful glory. One of them has a dinosaur on it, honest.

Released to celebrate ten years of Sky+, the service that freed thousands of Brits from the tyranny of Cillit Bang adverts, these colourful cases have a capacity of 1TB and sport designs from the likes of Matthew Williamson, Agent Provocateur and Farrow & Ball. Each is guaranteed to make everything else you own look absolutely disgusting by comparison.

Sky reckons more than 8.3 million houses now have Sky+. That's apparently more than the number of households that have children, second on the list of things people would most like to pause.

Sky+ HD did very well in our Greatest Gadget of the 21st Century competition last year, battling its way to the final four before being knocked out by the Xbox 360. It's also one of the few bits of tech to be awarded the full five stars in our review.

You can pre-order these bolshy boxes on Sky's website -- register your interest on the site and someone will call you within 48 hours about buying one. It costs £49 for existing customers to get one, £149 if you're new to the world of Sky. The one with a dinosaur on it doesn't cost any more than the others, even though it's the best one.

Let us know in the comments, on our Facebook wall or over on Google+ if you've registered your interest, and whether you've successfully managed to get one of these limited edition boxes into your house. Have a look through the gallery -- the first one is from Agent Provocateur.

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Basso & Brooke lend their talents to this colourful display.

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This is Celia Birtwell's design. It's a shame all of these are destined to collect dust, wedged under a telly, really.

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Farrow & Ball here. If only there was some way of mounting these...

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Richard Nicoll's effort is fresh and floral. Of course, to mount these you'd need a really chunky frame.

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Though perhaps you could just prop them up on a mantelpiece? This is Julie Verhoeven's work by the way.

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But then what about the wires? You couldn't have wires coming out your mantelpiece, people would think you were mad. Oh, this is Roksanda Ilincic's design.

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This pattern is from Solange Azagury-Partridge (amazingly, that's a real person). Maybe you could buy two of these, and put one under your telly and prop the other one up on the mantelpiece...