Customized furniture, if you can make it, is the way to go. I had originally contacted Argosy to build me a console desk, however, based on their quoted price I opted to build my own. While it doesn't look anywhere near as profession as there's, the price was about 1/10th of what they'd have charged me. A lot of my homemade console desk was made out of steel scrap I had lying around, and I purchased some additional material to complete the structure.
Picture before installing gear:
Picture after installing gear:
The main structure of the console table is 2"x2", 1/8" wall square tubing, and the minor pieces to tie it together are 1" square, 1/8" wall square tubing, all mild steel, welded and ground, primed and painted.
Before I humped the sections from the driveway where I built it, to my garage loft studio, I fully "tested" it for strength. I laid plywood across the top, then proceeded to jump up and down on it. Repeatedly.
And here is a picture of my open-frame under-console rack, with felt feet so the steel frame doesn't scratch the new floor:
While it looks lilke its attached to the underside of the console table, it isn't, it just sits there. Without any gear installed you can twist it just a little, but with 16U (8 and 8) of Akai hard disk recorders its rock solid. And on top of the 8U of recorders (per half), there is 3U (per half) of available space for other things I need in the front of the room as well.
The two pairs of 12U rack rails cost me about $20 a pair, I lopped off 1U giving me 11U per side, and the steel was just stuff I had left over from building the console table, so it cost me a whopping $40 or thereabouts. And took less than a day to build. Probably about 4 hours tops.