Custom Integration Archives - Page 2 of 3

Keeping the Spies at Bay

also on Cineluxe

The Arguments Against Streaming
Just Don’t Cut It Anymore

My Love/Hate Relationship with
Dolby Atmos

People eager to dive into voice control have found their personal data being exploited and even handed over to the authorities. But there are alternatives.

by Dennis Burger
September 30, 2022

You’ve likely seen the alarming headlines about all the ways companies such as Amazon and Google share personal data from their voice-control and smart home products with law enforcement, advertisers, and other tech giants. Needless to say, most people who bought an Amazon Echo or a Google Home speaker didn’t know this sort of relinquishment of privacy was part of the bargain, and it’s probably safe to assume most of them consider it too steep a price to pay just for a bit of enhanced convenience.

If all the above has made you hesitant to buy into a voice-control system, no one could blame you—especially if your data and your privacy are among your most valuable assets. Fortunately, Amazon and Google aren’t the only names in town when it comes to providing sophisticated voice control for things like your entertainment systems and smart home devices. Higher-end solutions exist that can do the job without intruding on your privacy.

Probably the most enticing alternative—especially for luxury entertainment systems and high-end living spaces—is Josh AI, which offers a commitment to data privacy the mass-market solutions don’t.

Unlike Google and Amazon, Josh AI doesn’t upload every word you utter to the cloud for processing. What you say isn’t stored on some remote server and used to triangulate your buying habits. Instead, Josh operates almost entirely inside your home on custom servers you yourself own. Very little information is sent over the internet, and you can delete your entire chat history at the touch of a button. You can also mute or turn off microphones easily.

Josh is also much more décor-friendly. Instead of tacky little fabric-covered speaker boxes, it relies on lovely and discrete microphone arrays, some designed to fit into Lutron wall plates. Josh also adapts to the way you speak instead of forcing you to learn unnatural and arcane syntax. Natural Language Processing allows for a more conversational control experience, allowing you to combine commands and create complex instructions like, “Hey Josh, dim the lights, cool the media room to 71°, lower the shades, and play the latest episode of The Rings of Power.” The system also relies on advanced AI learning to better adapt to your speech patterns and lifestyle habits over time; but if that feels too invasive, you can turn it off.

If you want to control your premium entertainment space—and the rest of your connected home—with the power of your voice, Josh AI is more than merely a compelling alternative to invasive mass-market solutions from the likes of Amazon or Google. Not only is it purpose-designed for the task but it’s easier to integrate into high-end interiors and high-end control systems. But perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t involve selling your digital soul to the lowest bidder.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

The Josh AI Nano voice controller incorporated into a Lutron custom wall plate

The Last Days of the Man Cave

also on Cineluxe

Survival of the Savviest

Home Theater’s Second Golden Age

The Godfather—The Greatest, or Just Great?

What’s So Great About Color?

They were a necessary step in the evolution of private cinemas, but the time has come to leave these primitive ancestors behind

by Michael Gaughn
September 13, 2022

I once consulted on a theater room for a well-known actor. (I can’t give you his name but can tell you his initials were JD, he was known far more for his looks than his acting ability, and he was married to a famous singer.) He had the usual sprawling, status-dripping gleaming-white home far up in the Hollywood Hills, and many decorators had spent many hours making it all look very much up to date and expensive.

He couldn’t wait to show me his existing home theater, which he had put together himself after watching a bunch of YouTube videos and reading a bunch of articles online. The room itself was plenty big enough for a theater, but the projector was a tiny piece of cheap plastic better suited for boardroom presentations sitting on a bare piece of plywood supported by a couple of $5 Home Depot brackets. The opposite wall was indiscriminately slathered in Screen Goo. In between sat three rows of cheap, uncomfortable recliners. He grinned proudly as he fired up the projector but the picture was so dim it was the ghost of anything resembling a real image. I felt ill imagining him eagerly ushering in the Hollywood elite for evenings of butt-twitching washed-out cinema.

Here’s my point: He built that room, and was proud of it, because that’s what the media had shown him was a legitimate space for watching movies at home. And now the world’s most powerful influencers were filing through there and then going forth, like seed pods dispersed, to reinforce the notion that something that dismal was somehow OK—worse, as good as it gets.

We’ve got the man cave to blame for all that. But thankfully its days are numbered and it’s about to disappear over the horizon like an exiled dictator forced to drift the seas on a makeshift raft.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the emergence of the cave, but most of it rests on the polo-shirted shoulders of the integrator crowd—although they were, maybe more appropriately, called installers back when this all started. This is an industry built on alarm salesmen, stereo fanatics, and early adopters of surround sound, and they tended to cobble together rooms based on a rudimentary technical knowledge of audio and video but with little sense of the aesthetics of picture and sound. As for the design of the room itself, you could pretty much forget about any tact or taste and would likely end up with the equivalent of Michael Scott’s St. Pauli Girl sign—which is why architects and interior designers tended to shudder whenever the AV guy showed up.

But in a sense the cave served us well. It showed people it was possible to watch movies at home, and eventually showed them they could have an experience that topped anything their local mall cinema could deliver. The problem is that, design-wise, the whole thing ossified early on so that even the highest-end theaters were often little better than glorified rec rooms and rarely kept up with either the technology or the changing ways people live their lives.

So many of these theaters were shoebox-shaped rooms with a bunch of posters on the wall and filled with unsightly furniture that a whole cottage industry emerged for handing out awards to anybody who could come up with something that didn’t look like that. And the systems within them tended to be crafted and tuned for watching demo scenes, not movies, which tended to make them assaultive rather than enticing and has now come to have a pernicious influence on moviemaking itself.

The man cave was aptly named—it’s always been less a space than an attitude born of testosterone. Inevitably, it was the dominant male of the home who lusted for and lorded it over the theater and it was the inevitably male installers who created systems only the male of the home could figure out how to use (if he was lucky). And the fare tended to be stuff only the male of the home would ever want to watch—not because they were great movies but because they gave him a chance to show off.

The result? The other family members would drift away over time, frustrated and minimized, feeling like extras in somebody else’s production, and the room would fall into disuse, eventually sealed off from the rest of the home like an EPA Superfund site.

These rooms still exist of course, with new ones popping up every day—mainly because the personality type that led to their creation is still very much with us. And, it has to be said, because the media has done a piss-poor job of letting people know there are better alternatives. But shifts in both social and family dynamics and some astonishing technological evolution that’s led to the possibility of truly responsive and accommodating systems and spaces are quickly pushing the man cave as far into the past as possible, ushering in a new era of theaters that address the interests and needs of all members of the family, and a wide variety of guests, in rooms that feel organically part of the home—while still providing a chance to step into a realm well beyond the pressures of the world.

So, goodbye man cave. We owe you a modicum of thanks—and a huge good riddance.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

“In a sense, the man cave served us well. It showed people it was possible to watch movies at home, and eventually showed them they could have an experience that topped anything their local mall cinema could deliver.”

“Inevitably, it was the dominant male of the home who lusted for and lorded it over the theater and it was the inevitably male installers who created systems only the male of the home could figure out how to use.”

Inside the Secret Cinema: The Automation

Inside the Secret Cinema | The Automation

photo | Ryan Wicks Photography

Cineluxe showcase

Achieving Serenity

Inside the Ultimate
Home Entertainment Space

A Tribeca Trendsetter

Music for Art’s Sake

A combination of ingenious automation and good old-fashioned button-pushing was deployed to ensure this private theater’s ease of use

by Dennis Burger
September 7, 2022

What’s most fascinating about this delightful little hideaway home cinema is that it underlines the distinction between wowing people with experiences and attempting to wow them with the technology. Equippd resisted the temptation to automate everything, opting instead to create a system that reflects how the family actually uses the theater.

The screen, projector, and movie player would all seem like perfect candidates for full-on automation. The proportions of the Screen Research projection screen, for instance, can be adjusted to create either a standard (16:9) or widescreen (2.35:1) aspect ratio, while the Sony projector has lens memory and can shift between these screen formats. Meanwhile, the Kaleidescape movie player is capable of sending commands to both the screen and projector to switch between screen shapes. But Equippd co-founder Matthew McCourt and his team opted for a more hands-on approach—buttons on the Control 4 control system that allow users to manually switch between the two ratios.

Why not simply let the Kaleidescape handle the job? “The main content sources for the theater aside from the Kaleidescape are things like the Sky Q, Apple TV, and a games console in a concealed pullout drawer hidden in the wall,” McCourt says. “The reason we didn’t use any auto screen adjustments is, for most sources they would have to select it manually anyway, and if certain sources are doing it automatically and other sources are doing it manually, it’s more confusing. So we just taught them once how to do it with two buttons.”

There are automated events tied to the entertainment system, though. When the family navigates to the Control 4 home screen, some of the lights brighten gently and the LEDs in the coffers shift to red. But when sources like Apple TV or Sky Q are selected, the lights automatically dim gently. “They’re triggering these events with their activities rather than allowing the device to dictate lighting changes based on content,” McCourt said.

Maybe the most intriguing use of automation, though, are the routines that come into play whenever someone first enters the room and after the last person has left. The first person to open the custom entry door triggers a wakeup routine—lights slowly coming on to a comfortable level, shades lowering, the projector firing up, the Control 4 homepage popping up on the screen.

It all starts with contact closures on the door. Think of them like magnetic switches. If someone opens the closures when no one else is in the room, they send a signal to the Lutron Homeworks QS system tasked with handling the overall room automation, which in turn informs the Control 4 system responsible for the home theater devices, and the two work together to wake up all of the necessary electronics.

But how does the system know whether anyone is still in the theater? If you have much experience with occupancy sensors, you know they’re great at picking up when someone walks into or through an area but aren’t always great at continuing to monitor whether people are sitting quietly on a sofa, say, watching a film. To make that all work, McCourt and his crew used a combination of passive infrared and microwave sensors. “We’ve tested it with people sitting very still for hours, hardly moving at all, and we really do get a true representation of whether that room is occupied or not. So, under those circumstances, people can come and go as they please without affecting the lights or the shades. It’s only when you enter an empty room that the magic happens.”

And while the family can easily press a single button to turn the room off and return it to its ready state, they can also just walk away and shut the door behind them, secure in the knowledge that the Lutron and Control 4 systems will take care of turning everything off. “The owners literally can just leave the lights on or shades shut, and 15 minutes after they leave—boom! Shades come up, lights are off, and the room is rolled back into a sort of ready state.”

photo | Ryan Wicks Photography

related feature

Secret Cinema

SECRET CINEMA

tucked away within a manor house nestled in the lush English countryside, this high-performance private theater proves to be something very much more than just an intriguing novelty

BY MICHAEL GAUGHN

photos | Ryan Wicks Photography

You’d expect an article entitled “Secret Cinema” to be all about how cleverly this room is hidden away. It’s not. Putting all the emphasis there would be doing the room, the home, the homeowners, and the team that whipped up this cool, gleaming gem of a theater a huge disservice because, while the whole “hidden away” thing is definitely intriguing, leaning on it too hard would obscure that this is as much a serious cinema as a secret one.

Hidden theaters aren’t a new idea. But they’re too often little more than a gimmick or a novelty in homes where they just don’t belong. And because they’re a wedged-in fit, the graft rarely takes and they quickly go the way of most man caves, with their secluded status making it that much more easy for them to fall into neglect. But there’s a romance to the idea of a concealed room in an old English manor house that makes secreting away a theater feel perfectly apt, even inevitable, as expected as the climbing ivy, supercilious felines, and moldering aristocrats.

an old English manor house that makes secreting away a theater feel perfectly apt, even inevitable, as expected as the climbing ivy, supercilious felines, and moldering aristocrats.

The cinema here is the work of Equippd, the Surrey-based firm founded in 2013 by brothers Charlie and Matthew McCourt. The McCourts are representative

Equippd’s Matthew McCourt

of a new breed of custom integrator, as aware of architecture and design and the overall domestic environment as they are of picture and sound. Unlike their predecessors, whose roots as alarm installers and AV guys too obviously and often showed, they think beyond creating drab, intimidating spaces optimized for playing demo scenes to how they can put tech, design, and structure at the service of the entertainment experience, paying just as much attention to the look and feel of the space as to the gear.

Because they get it—and get it with flair—Equippd was perfectly positioned to create this ambitious melding of old and new worlds.

The cinema here is the work of Equippd, the Surrey-based firm founded in 2013 by brothers Charlie and Matthew McCourt. The McCourts are representative of a new breed of custom integrator, as aware of architecture and design and the overall domestic environment as they are of picture and sound. Unlike their predecessors, whose roots as alarm installers and AV guys too obviously and often showed, they think beyond creating drab, intimidating spaces optimized for playing demo scenes to how they can put tech, design, and structure at the service of the entertainment experience, paying just as much attention to the look and feel of the space as to the gear.

Because they get it—and get it with flair—Equippd was perfectly positioned to create this ambitious melding of old and new worlds.

Room to Dream

The hidden-room thing wasn’t even part of the original plan. The homeowner had converted a stuffy and unloved Edwardian ballroom into a children’s playroom but the space was so big it felt more oppressive than playful. Having encountered one of Equippd’s other cinemas in a home in

the very contemporary cinema is secreted within a very traditional country manor house located in Rodborough Common in Glousterschire

That description doesn’t do her reaction justice, though. As Matthew McCourt relates the Wimbledon encounter, “She walked in, saw the room, and said, ‘I want this—exactly this—at my house.’”

Equippd’s solution was to bisect the ballroom, retaining the play space in one half and conjuring up a theater in the other, using a prominent structural beam as a natural line of demarcation. While planning the partition wall, the unavoidable issue arose of what to do about the door. Doors are the bane of any theater designer’s existence. They’re an obvious necessity but there’s rarely a great way to integrate them. It was tackling that problem, though, that brought the whole concept for the theater into focus. As McCourt remembers, “Suddenly it was like, ‘How do we incorporate a door into the partition so you can access your cinema? Well, let’s hide it.’” The result was a flush-mounted entrance in the theater covered in the same fabric as the walls, allowing it to blend into the decor, and, in the playroom, a hinged faux bookcase, devised by designer Nadira Van de Grift.

But the impact of entering the hidden realm rests less on the theatrical touch of the prop bookcase and more on the dramatic contrast between the environments on either side of the wall—a play space with unmistakable traces of its Edwardian roots on one and a very much contemporary entertainment hideaway on the other. “Hiding the cinema,” says McCourt, “creates the experience of transitioning from a traditional house to a completely different dimension.”

Wimbledon, she approached the company about somehow incorporating something similar into her albatross of a room.

a great way to integrate them. It was tackling that problem, though, that brought the whole concept for the theater into focus. As McCourt remembers, “Suddenly it was like, ‘How do we incorporate a door into the partition so you can access your cinema? Well, let’s hide it.’” The result was a flush-mounted entrance in the theater covered in the same fabric as the walls, allowing it to blend into the decor, and, in the playroom, a hinged faux bookcase, devised by designer Nadira Van de Grift.

the work of designer Nadira Van de Grift, this faux bookcase offers an appropriately theatrical way to enter the private cinema

PROJECT TEAM

Matthew McCourt
Equippd

Nadira Van de Grift
NV Design

James Morton
JPM Carpentry

The theater’s striking yet understated look is all the doing of Equippd, which was given free rein over not just the entertainment system but the room itself. The textured wall material is a variation on the covering from the Wimbledon theater, with the recessed LED accent lights lining the ceiling, window ledges, and riser carried over from that theater as well. The result is a space that feels like a private retreat, separate from the rest of the home, but without looking like it dropped from the moon.

unmistakable traces of its Edwardian roots on one and a very much contemporary entertainment hideaway on the other. “Hiding the cinema,” says McCourt, “creates the experience of transitioning from a traditional house to a completely different dimension.”

The Proper Respect

In a literal sense, though, the secret cinema isn’t even part of the home at all. Since this is a historic residence, Equippd had to make every effort to preserve the original room, exhibiting a surgeon’s care when executing the theater.

The answer—which actually solved a number of problems—was to a create a completely independent structure within the existing space. The theater is basically a stud-wall box that rests inside the ballroom, only anchored to the walls, floor, and ceiling where absolutely necessary. As McCourt relates, “It could actually be dismantled and the room returned to its original form without too much trouble.”

the theater is essentially a completely independent box resting within the confines of an Edwardian ballroom

Taking this tack allowed Equippd to create a self-contained modern theater with the ideal acoustics already built in. To keep sound from traveling to other parts of the home, the subwoofers are suspended within the walls, and the ceiling sits decoupled from the room’s actual ceiling to prevent any bleed into the children’s bedrooms just above.

The theater also comes with its own infrastructure. “Because this room is essentially sealed off, air handling was quite important,” explains McCourt. “So we created a fresh-air input, which gently comes through the fabric on the front wall, to give you a nice flow of air through the cinema. We also have a very quiet extraction system at the back, which then pulls out the old air.”

The knocks against having windows in a theater are many. They can be distracting, allow in unwanted sunlight, make it harder to control the climate in the space, and reflect audio from the speakers, muddying the sound. The usual recourse is to just cover them over or remove them completely. But the views of the Gloucestershire countryside are so spectacular it would have significantly diminished the impact of the theater to conceal them. Plus, the windows help keep the smallish space from feeling claustrophobic.

But, very much of their period, they could have been a jarring note in the otherwise contemporary design. Equippd’s solution was to employ a Lutron automated shading system, wedding the textured wall covering to a standard set of blackout shades so the windows all but disappear at movie time.

Another Dimension

Because the home sits in the middle of an intensely scenic area with a dearth of commercial cinemas nearby, the private theater gets heavy use. And because the family is hardcore about their movie watching, it needed to be high-performance. The 4K projector beams onto a screen that can be adjusted to accommodate both standard and widescreen viewing. A Dolby Atmos system provides the sound, while the room-within-a-room construction offers optimal acoustics and the shading system seals out any extraneous light.

Showcase

Achieving Serenity

Inside the Ultimate
Home Entertainment Space

A Tribeca Trendsetter

Luxury Made Easy

the cinema features a screen that can accommodate both standard and widescreen aspect ratios, textured wall covering that’s also incorporated into the door and shades, and variable-colored LED accent lighting

But high-performance systems are almost invariably complex. And it’s tempting, with all that technology on hand, to attempt to automate every aspect of their operation. But that can often result in leading users down rabbit holes they then can’t easily emerge from. Equippd’s approach was to take basic functions like selecting the aspect ratio or the sound format and make them simple “this or that” choices so there’s no possible confusion and an evening’s entertainment isn’t ruined by rigid automated routines that have other ideas about how things should go.

One of the theater’s most intriguing features is fully automated, though, with a series of triggers and sensors synced up to provide ease of use and help create the appropriate mood. A contact switch in the door lets the system know when someone has first entered, causing it to bring down the shades, bring up the lights, turn on the projector, and so on. Occupancy sensors then monitor if the room is in use so it doesn’t go into its startup routine every time somebody comes through the door. When the last person has left, everything returns to standby mode after 15 minutes, ready to kick in again for the next movie night.

The line between gimmickry and legitimacy really isn’t that thin. Neither is the line between a theater that’s imposed on a home—and the homeowners—and one that’s respectful of the residence and responsive to how people actually live their lives. Home cinemas are, finally, after all these decades, evolving beyond their man cave ancestors, being higher performance, more flexible, and in every way more sophisticated. And that doesn’t just pertain to more radical open-floorplan entertainment spaces but has seriously upped the game for traditional private theaters as well.

Yes, this British cinema is hidden—but Equippd’s mastery of modern trends and responsiveness to the clients’ needs and desires allowed McCourt and company to transcend what could have been little more than a parlor trick and deliver both a solid, up-to-date theater and a captivating room that successfully checks off all the boxes.

Inside the Secret Cinema

The Automation

MORE ABOUT EQUIPPD

People First, Then the Gear

Music for Art’s Sake

The desire to have an expansive art collection on display made filling this Manhattan apartment with sumptuous sound a challenge

by Michael Gaughn
July 13, 2022

The one inescapable truth of Manhattan real estate is that, no matter how prodigious the space or the wealth of resources at hand, getting what you want requires being a master of the art of compromise. The trick is making it all happen without feeling squeezed—space-wise, convenience-wise, performance-wise, pleasure-wise.

Everything about Hudson Yards would be considered generous, even by Manhattan standards. A gleaming-new city within the city resting above the railroad yards in midtown, its opulent living spaces offer heart-of-the-island convenience, killer views, and, when it comes to square footage, a decent amount of room to roam. But there are limits.

Paint Me a Picture

Consider this scenario: You have an extensive collection of paintings and sculpture you want to have on display to both ponder and savor. The collection will fill virtually all of the walls and much of the floor. But you also want to fill your space with music, which you’re used to experiencing at a level of quality on par with your other art. So where do the speakers go?

That was the challenge facing Anthony Chrisostomo of Home Theater of Long Island who, along with co-owner Nick Tzortzatos, had worked with the client for years, having provided the

photos & video | John Frattasi, Gusto Multimedia

entertainment and smart-home amenities for her residences in Morristown and Stone Harbor, New Jersey. They’d been able to easily meet her needs before—but they’d also had a lot more room to work with.

The client didn’t want any speakers on the walls at Hudson Yards—but even if she’d been willing to consider it, building policy frowns heavily on breaching anything in the apartments. As Chrisostomo explained, “This building has more requirements than any other one we’ve worked in because it’s above the rail yards, so there’s heightened security.” Also, two of the walls in the main living area are filled with floor-to-ceiling windows offering views of downtown from Chelsea to Battery Park and up and down the Hudson River. So placement options were limited—beyond limited.

the minimalist sculptural form of Meridian’s 7200SE speakers proved the ideal complement to the client’s extensive collection of art

Then there was the Meridian factor. The client already has speakers from that high-performance audio brand throughout her two main residences and very much wanted them in her pied-à-terre as well. But Meridian’s offerings are known as much for being bold statements in design as for their sound and engineering. They’re not bland little boxes you tuck discretely away in a cubby or corner—you put them proudly on display.

That proved to be both a plus and a minus. The top-tier 7200SE models in the main living area can be appropriately described as sculptural, and their clean modernist lines dovetail nicely with the other art in the room—so, that problem solved. But having freestanding speakers means having cables, and cables have to run somewhere, and cables are, at best, unsightly. But since the Meridians have the necessary electronics built in, they require just a single wire carrying the music source. Chrisostomo was able to use the standard networking lines already threaded throughout the building to send sound to the speakers, which meant only having to have one thin strand of cable running from the wall.

A naive bystander might wonder “Why not go wireless?” And Chrisostomo acknowledges that would have been an option. “But that would have detracted from the aesthetics of the space because we would have had to place equipment within the room to feed and power the speakers.”

The master and guest bedrooms weren’t as daunting because they’re smaller spaces where sound is needed mainly for TV viewing. And both placement and wiring were much simpler since less imposing speakers could be clustered around the screens. The master bedroom has the demure for Meridian M6 speakers wedded to a Leon soundbar placed beneath the screen, while the

Showcase

Inside the Ultimate
Home Entertainment Space

Achieving Serenity

A Tribeca Trendsetter

the master bedroom (above) and guest bedroom (below)

soundbar in the guest bedroom is joined with a pair of Meridian DSP3200s, which are decidedly compact but clearly born from the same design lineage as the statement speakers in the main living area.

A Place in the Sun

Though not as big a challenge as the speakers, the “art everywhere” and “no breaching” edicts made implementing lighting and shading control a little more interesting than it would usually be. Art and sunlight are mortal enemies but, thanks to the western-facing curtain wall, the sun blasts into the apartment for hours leading up to twilight. Just sealing out the light—and thus the views—wasn’t an option, though.

But because the tech involved is far more discreet than it would have been for the speakers, wireless was an option here, with Chrisostomo able to deploy a Lutron Homeworks QS system that automatically adjusts the raising and lowering of the shades for the time of day. Paired with semi-transparent shading material that sufficiently dims the room without entombing it, warm evening light still suffuses the space but without threatening the art.

It’s probably not surprising to learn that the quality of light, in all its many forms, was

especially important to the client—which led to her getting fairly heavily involved with setting up the automation. “She’s very particular about the different moods she wants to set,” said Chrisostomo, “so she got really granular when it came to each button and what it was going to do.”

And the Lutron system treats the apartment with the proper respect, with the minimalist controls able to be mounted on the walls while looking like they’re integrated into the walls. The combination of wall keypads and desktop controllers placed within easy reach give the client complete but unobtrusive control over the many moods of her space.

It’s hard to emphasize just how flexible and responsive technology—and the designers and integrators who deploy it—have become within the past few years. Just about everything involving high-end home entertainment used to be a major bait & switch, promising effortless comfort and infinite pleasure and delivering something that not only didn’t live up to the promise but was frustrating, even maddening, to use. Not just the tech but the design mindset of the recent past wouldn’t have been able to make something like this Hudson Yards dwelling happen, instead forcing the homeowner to settle for a series of unacceptable compromises that would have seriously detracted from the quality of her life. But the fetters are now off, and the evidence of the new paradigm is abundant. The trick, of course, is hooking up with a design team that’s attuned to your desires but once you’ve cleared that hurdle, the course is clear and the finish line now easily with reach.

Cineluxe Showcase

Our in-depth looks at some of the most innovative, versatile, and just plain fun entertainment spaces in the world

achieving serenity

how an impossible private cinema came to bloom in the Palm Springs desert

“Serenity is a freshly minted 22,000 sq. ft. home nuzzling a golf course in Indian Wells, CA. Done in the kind of Mies-gone-wild style that’s become a signature look in expansive post-millennium west coast homes, it features a wide-open floorplan that’s as much about outdoors as indoors, and hinges its effect on a seamless flow between those two worlds. The whole is infused with a very contemporary sense of play, best evinced on the lower level, which gives off a distinctive carnival vibe, with guests free to stroll from the sports-car collection past a two-story rotating wine tower and onto an elaborate dance floor, then pass a Zen garden on their way to the private cinema—a cinema, by the way, that really shouldn’t exist. And yet there it is.” read more

secret cinema

tucked away in a manor house in the lush English countryside, this high-performance private theater proves to be something very much more than just an intriguing novelty

“It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect this article to be all about how cleverly this room is hidden away. It’s not. Putting all the emphasis there would be doing the room, the home, the homeowners, and the team that whipped up this cool, gleaming gem of a theater a huge disservice because, while the whole ‘hidden away’ thing is definitely intriguing, leaning on it too hard would obscure that this is as much a serious cinema as a secret one.” read more

spanish treasure

an intense collaboration between the homeowners and their designer resulted in a cutting-edge Old World private cinema

“This is the story of a unique theater and of a unique collaboration—about how an all-star team had to muster all its expertise to get the square peg of a room to fit into the round hole of the area they had to work with without having any of the seams show. And about how they were able to turn a daunting number of liabilities into virtues, letting those challenges serve as inspiration to whip up a private cinema that dovetails neatly with the look of the rest of the home while exhibiting an appropriately theatrical flair that makes it a singular and dashing design statement of its own.” read more

rooms for improvement

the entertainment spaces in this Australian home are undeniably spectacular—but after a decade in use, they were ready for a major sonic makeover

“This story could have easily just been about the Theo Kalomirakis-designed Art Deco home cinema. Or it could have focused instead on the jawdropping one-of-a-kind entertainment area, with its discreet stage, ability to accommodate 250 guests, and epic views of Sydney Harbor. But there turned out to be an even bigger—though not quite as showy and obvious—story to be told, about how these kinds of high-end spaces have become so elaborate and flexible and the trends and technologies influencing and supporting them are evolving so quickly, that we’re now being presented with an unprecedented array of opportunities—but also the continual challenge of staying ahead of the curve.” read more

inside the ultimate
home entertainment space

this domestic entertainment complex includes not just one of the great home theaters but also a nightclub, a gaming arcade, and even a café

“Designer Theo Kalomirakis and acoustician Steve Haas have collaborated on a number of cost-no-object home theaters, but probably none of those efforts has been as ambitious, versatile, or well-realized as the Paradiso. Seventeen years in the making, this Southern California gem is actually an entire home-entertainment complex built around an Italianate piazza. The reference-quality 15-seat home theater doubles as a fully-fledged concert hall. The nightclub features a hydraulic stage and can handle anything from a rock band to a jazz group. Next door to the club resides an arcade, containing the homeowner’s extensive collection of pinball machines and video games. There’s even a g-force flight simulator.” read more

a tribeca trendsetter

the desire for a casual movie-watching space in this apartment’s main living area led to the creation of a high-performance hideaway theater

“Ed Gilmore casually bringing some shots of a project he’d done in Tribeca up on his computer monitor was a major ‘a-ha’ moment for me. The first shot showed a stylish, obviously comfortable living area that also served as a billiards room, dining room, and kitchen. The second showed the same room transformed into a home entertainment space a lot of people would die for. That, a completely intuitive part of me screamed, perfectly represents the new paradigm. Others apparently agree with that conclusion because people just won’t leave Ed alone about the Tribeca space. Ironically, even he admits it’s not perfect—but it’s getting there, as the client invests more and more in turning what was initially a whim into a room that can blow a typical movie theater out of the water.” read more

luxury made easy

a prefabricated premium theater that not only met but exceeded the client’s high expectations

“Seeing the interest in dedicated theater rooms decline over the past few years, legendary designer Theo Kalomirakis has helped form Rayva, a company devoted to dramatically simplifying the process of designing, engineering, and installing high-end theaters. Rayva recently completed a signature installation in Westchester County, north of New York City, that’s meant to show that the company’s streamlined approach to theater design can yield a luxury result.” read more

music for art’s sake

the desire to have an expansive art collection on display made filling this Manhattan apartment with sumptuous sound a challenge

“The one inescapable truth of Manhattan real estate is that, no matter how prodigious the space or the wealth of resources at hand, getting what you want requires being a master of the art of compromise. The trick is making it all happen without feeling squeezed—space-wise, convenience-wise, performance-wise, pleasure-wise. Everything about Hudson Yards would be considered generous, even by Manhattan standards. A gleaming-new city within the city resting above the railroad yards in midtown, its opulent living spaces offer heart-of-the-island convenience, killer views, and, when it comes to square footage, a decent amount of room to roam. But there are limits.” read more

A Tribeca Trendsetter

showcase

ACHIEVING SERENITY

INSIDE THE ULTIMATE HOME ENTERTAINMENT SPACE

LUXURY MADE EASY

A Tribeca Trendsetter

The desire for a casual movie-watching space in this apartment’s main living area led to the creation of a high-performance hideaway theater

by Michael Gaughn
November 29, 2018

Ed Gilmore casually bringing some shots of a project he’d done in Tribeca up on his computer monitor was a major “a-ha” moment for me. The first shot showed a stylish, obviously comfortable living area that also served as a billiards room, dining room, and kitchen. The second showed the same room transformed into a home entertainment space a lot of people would die for. That, a completely intuitive part of me screamed, perfectly represents the new paradigm.

Others apparently agree with that conclusion because people just won’t leave Ed alone about the Tribeca space. Ironically, even he admits it’s not perfect—but it’s getting there, as the client invests more and more in turning what was initially a whim into a room that can blow a typical movie theater out of the water.

Having since had a chance to actually visit the space, and to shoot some video there, I recently circled back around with Ed to talk about all things Tribeca.

People seem to love that installation because it says that almost any room can now be transformed into a legitimate entertainment space.

I think what we did was to, in a minimally invasive way, create a home theater experience in a room that, if you looked at it from any angle, you would immediately say it couldn’t be done there. There was just no way.

Aesthetically, the room had already been designed before you came into the picture. How were you able to navigate those waters?

We just needed to be open and try to find really unique solutions that would both satisfy a high-end level of performance as well as maintain a certain aesthetic value the client wanted us to maintain, and be true to the bones of that room. I don’t think that’s any rare talent. The issue was that he had interviewed a lot of other AV guys who told him right off the bat, “No, we won’t do that.” And that wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. So we were lucky enough to be able to convince him that we could do it, and it could be compelling.

Tribeca video | Alyssa Neece

“We needed to be open and try to find unique solutions that would both satisfy a high-end level of performance as well as maintain a certain aesthetic value the client wanted us to maintain, and be true to the bones of that room.”

—Ed Gilmore

a retractable screen, ceiling speakers, and a projector on a lift allow the apartment’s main living area to be transformed into a better-than-movie-theater entertainment space

A Garden of Immersive Delights

In the Service of the Senses

Your Home is Your Canvas

That communal area wasn’t supposed to be the main entertainment space, right?

Right. The den is the room where he really sits and watches most of his TV. That was the room he wanted to spend some money on. This other room was kind of an experiment for him.

But as he saw it implemented, immediately he thought, “I’m going to sink some more money into this room.” And that’s exactly what he did. That’s what he did with the Kaleidescape Strato, that’s what he did with the Steinway Lyngdorf, and what he’s about to do with projection, by upgrading the projector there as well.

Are people fascinated by that room because it’s a kind of outlier or because it represents a trend?

I think it’s a little bit of both. It’s tapping into a trend, that trend being that people aren’t interested in having dedicated rooms for specific purposes like a theater, or even a dedicated music room.

There’s also an aspirational aspect to it as well. It resonates with people because it’s well done. I mean, it’s a really beautiful space. And it’s well thought out. And that goes back to the developer, who did a really nice job on that building. The dimensions of the room are great, and it has this wonderful warm feeling to it without really needing much in terms of other types of interior design.

But these particular clients do have taste, and they’ve been around the block a few times in terms of renovations. He is a serial renovator. And so their choice of artwork, their choice of furnishings—those little details that they have there are great. And I think that resonates with a lot of people, too.

If luxury is really about details—about somebody caring enough to make sure every last thing is done right—Tribeca would seem to qualify.

I think you and I agree on this, right? Attention to detail is really what matters in a luxury space. People have asked me about what luxury is, and I typically say that it needs to be inspirational. But that doesn’t mean it really needs to be noticeable. It’s something that kind of unfolds. And by the time you realize what’s happening, you’re kind of taken by surprise by it. And it’s organic—it feels like it was always part of what was meant to be there.

about Gilmore’s Sound Advice

Since 1991, Ed Gilmore and Gilmore’s Sound Advice, Inc. have been designing, deploying, and servicing hundreds of integrated systems by strictly adhering to a word-of-mouth recommendation policy. Typical systems consist of audio & video distribution, home theater, lighting & shading systems, enterprise-level network/WiFi & telephony, along with HVAC & security systems integration. In 2016, Sound Advice created one of the most unique showroom & event spaces in New York City.

Eric Thies: Bringing the Movies Home for Hollywood

“The bar for home cinemas is pretty high in Southern California. People are spending enormous amounts of money on making them great.”

The head of LA-based DSI Luxury Technology pulls no punches offering up his thoughts on private cinemas, outdoor theaters, and mega billionaires who expect the impossible

by D. Craig MacCormack
June 16, 2022

Most high-end integrators do private cinemas, but only a handful specialize in private cinemas for people who are actually in the movie industry. Eric Thies is one of them—and possibly the preeminent one—creating premium home entertainment spaces for directors, producers, actors—all kinds of spaces for all kinds of talent both above and below the line. But the efforts of his LA-based DSI Luxury Technology extend well beyond the film community, and well beyond rooms in the service of movie-watching, creating flexible and responsive smart homes as well.

We recently talked to Eric about the diversity of his company’s capabilities and specifically about the challenges and opportunities of servicing the market in and around LA.

What is unique about how you approach doing a home theater, compared to integrators who work elsewhere in the country?

Since we’re in Southern California, the first question we ask clients is, “Are you in the entertainment industry?” That can change the direction of where we take the theater.

If they are in the industry and have access to studio content, then we’re going to be doing a full DCI [Digital Cinema Initiatives] theater, which means we’re going to be installing a professional projector and movie server since they’re going to be able to get the same version of a film that’s released in theaters on a hard drive that’s messengered to the house or perhaps over the air to a streaming device—not an Apple TV, but something more elaborate than that.

Then there are going to be a lot of considerations to make that professional theater work in a residential environment. If they’re in the Bel Air Circuit, we’ve got to get all that equipment in the house some way, which means we need lots more space than we would in a standard theater because a 4K DCI projector is much bigger than a 4K residential

Eric Thies is the founder of DSI Luxury Technology, the most awarded custom installation firm in North America. He is a member of the Home Technology Association and helped develop the HTA certification system. He is also a member of The Guild Integrator’s Alliance—an invitation-only group of 13 of the premier integration firms in the US.

The private cinemas on the Bel Air Circuit allow an exclusive group of people in the film industry to view the same digital version of a movie that’s distributed to commercial theaters

projector. Also, if we want to have Dolby Atmos content in our DCI playback, we have to get Dolby approval. Dolby has to sign off on the speaker placement, the speaker types we’re using—the SPL [sound-pressure level] is super important in that regard.

The other thing to consider is that the bar for home cinemas is pretty high in Southern California. Almost any luxury home we do has a space for one and people are spending enormous amounts of money on them and on making them great.

Given how complex these installations can be, what do you do when you have a client with unrealistic expectations?

We had a very famous billionaire who is very outspoken on Twitter—I can’t say who he is, but he’s trying to save the world by not using fossil fuels. We got a call on a Friday afternoon saying he needed a theater installed by the weekend. And we said, “That’s not how it works, sorry. If that’s what it takes to keep you as a client, we’re going to have to pass because we just can’t produce something we’re happy with in a few hours.”

There are a lot of factors that determine the time it takes to build a theater. One, are we doing a full isolation and acoustics package? Meaning, are we rebuilding the walls to keep sound from going out or from coming in? Are we going to do acoustic treatments on the walls, which needs acoustic design ahead of that and then fabric stretching? Rarely do we go in and just fill a drywall box and put speakers in the wall and a screen up with a projector. Typically, our rooms are constructed or demoed and then rebuilt.

DSI does many types of entertainment spaces beyond private theaters and is also known for its sophisticated whole-house automation

If we’re doing the construction—acoustics and everything—that’s typically a four- to six-month process. If we’re just coming in and putting up a screen and fixing the room acoustically via electronics, that’s probably two or three months before we finish it, depending on our lead time and the supply chain and all those things we’re dealing with right now.

What kind of price range are we talking about for a project of this magnitude and size?

I don’t think we’ve done a theater in a long time that’s any less than $50,000, and our theaters can go up to $2 million. I think our sweet spot, if you’re talking electronics and room buildout, is probably in the $500,000 to $700,000 range.

How do you make sure every project stays on time, on budget, and according to plan?

Theaters are a lot more contained, a lot easier to manage, with a lot less unpredictability than some of the other things we do because it’s usually only one room. There’s plenty to go wrong from a technology standpoint, and there are clients to manage with their grand ideas and changing their minds and all that other stuff, but for the most part, of all the things an integrator does, a theater is complex but predictable.

If you’re not used to doing high-performance theaters or you’re trying to reinvent the wheel every time you do one, that’s going to be painful. But if you’ve got a system in place, it’s a pretty predictable process and outcome. A construction manager I work with has a phrase: Get a client with a blank piece of land and a set of plans. The client is the variable, because they tend to change their mind and want something different or talk to a friend who has a different idea about the room and how they should use it.

Is there anything else you do that’s unique to the Southern California market?

Since we can actually watch movies outside 365 days a year, we do pretty elaborate outdoor living spaces with great audio and also great video. And that’s a trend that’s definitely going up. We’re getting a lot more requests for outdoor theaters.

Those are the most difficult because they want the experience but they don’t want to see anything. They don’t want a permanent screen up in their backyard, so either we’ve got to think of ways for screens to pop out of things or we have to think about bringing in a temporary screen, and how to have speakers, whether that be temporary or permanent. It’s a lot trickier than in home theaters.

Craig MacCormack is a Massachusetts-based writer and editor with more than a decade’s experience covering the AV integration industry. He was the executive editor for Commercial Integrator and has also written about digital finance, architecture and engineering, and local and national news and sports in his 27-year journalism career. You can connect with him on Twitter at @CraigMacCormack, but be warned, there’s a heavy Boston sports component to his tweets.

“Since we can actually watch movies outside 365 days a year, DSI does pretty elaborate outdoor living spaces with great audio and video. That’s a trend that’s definitely going up.”

Achieving Serenity: A Closer Look

Achieving Serenity | A Closer Look

Making this impossible theater possible took a lot of engineering, a lot of customization, and a little magic

by the Cineluxe staff
May 20, 2022

Technology is catching up with the growing desire for spaces that deliver the high-quality picture and sound of a dedicated home theater while offering the multi-use flexibility of a media room, but there is no one-size-fits-all plug & play solution if you’re looking for a truly premium experience. So an entertainment room like the one in Serenity required many teams of people working on the various technical tasks, often having to regroup, to pull this space off. Below, we provide high-level, jargon-free explanations of how they make these key contributions happen.

the speaker system

The tech team faced every imaginable hurdle installing a 35-speaker Atmos system in the theater but still achieved stellar results

“The home theater is Serenity’s audio video crown jewel but it offered by far the most significant design and installation challenges. ‘It wasn’t as if the theater could have been redesigned with walls or with better acoustical speaker placement. It just wasn’t possible,’ integrator Jeff Williams stated. So, it was a big challenge, especially with the number of speakers required for Dolby Atmos. From the get-go, Williams knew he was going to need expert help, and he went to Triad Speakers and its design team to see what was possible. “They were really the ones that spearheaded that entire design, which was really nice for us.”

read more

the sound processing

As important as all the other contributions were, it was some processing magic that took the Serenity theater over the top from impossible to real

“My initial impressions of the Serenity theater were based on a handful of images emailed to me by Mike Gaughn with a simple question: ‘Is there any way this room could sound good? Given the layout of the speakers, the material construction of the space, the variable of moving walls, etc., I thought about it and said, ‘I could make it sound really good . . . but only with Trinnov.’ So I wasn’t surprised to find out that’s exactly the audio processing employed in this room. The story of how Trinnov came to be involved is almost as interesting as the room itself.”

read more

the home automation

This sprawling, entertainment-oriented home put such big demands on its control system the company had to design new gear just to handle the load

“The heart of every smart home is the automation system but when you’re talking about a home the size of Serenity, with this many sub-systems being managed and controlled, not just any control system will do. The homeowner specifically wanted to use Control4, which was how integrator Jeff Williams was brought into the job. ‘Someone the owner knew had Control4 and loved it,’ Williams said, ‘and when we started the project, he said to us, “If it can be on Control4, I want it on that system. Period.”‘ That went on to include not just control over the reference home theater system but hundreds of circuits of lighting, 28 zones of HVAC, pool systems like fountains and pumps, more than 20 distributed audio video zones, and motorized drapery.”

read more

Custom Integration

Keeping the Spies at Bay

also on Cineluxe

Survival of the Savviest

The Last Days of the Man Cave

also on Cineluxe

Inside the Secret Cinema: The Automation

Cineluxe showcase

related feature

Secret Cinema

Music for Art’s Sake

Cineluxe Showcase

A Tribeca Trendsetter

Eric Thies: Bringing the Movies Home for Hollywood

Achieving Serenity: A Closer Look

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Type:

Genre:

Duration:

Average Rating:

Custom Integration

also on Cineluxe

also on Cineluxe

Cineluxe showcase

related feature

Recent Posts

Recent Comments