1. “House sound” is typically what you call a “California curve”. Boosted bass and treble; recessed mids. Not flat. Looks like a smiley-face on a graph. Designed to sound superficially pleasing with music in a showroom; and perhaps this might be user preference in a dedicated 2 channel system without EQ.
2. I don’t mean the “presets” you’re referring to. I’ve already explained what I mean by this: With speakers, you get -broadly- two categories of sound. The direct sound from the drivers; and the sound from the room interactions. That’s unavoidable. Therefore ideally, you need a speaker’s “off axis” response to be broadly similar to its on-axis response. That way, the sound from the room interactions is broadly similar. A lot of badly designed speakers from the likes of B&W have wildly different responses, which means that when you apply your room EQ (DIRAC; Audyssey; Roomperfect; ARC; YPAO; etc), the algorithms can’t do anything to meaningfully “flatten the curve” and it just sounds horrible. Even worse without room EQ.
MP950s don’t stick out particularly much. Even with my thin LG OLEDs; they’ve got some booty on them where the VESA mounts are; which mean you can’t really get a flush fit anyway.
The compromise -in my view- that the T series makes isn’t on cabinet volume. That just means they’re going to lack bass extension; which is fine (as you’d be crossing over with subs anyway). Rather, the compromise is the drivers. They have really poor off-axis response, which means they are unsuited to cinema duties (their main role). Were Kef to take another stab at them and apply the lessons they’ve learned on co-axial drivers since 2010, I think they’d be a really good speaker.
that said, I'll try and give them a listen at some point, and will look into the MK M70 etc. suggestions