home theater design Archives

Theater of Legends

photos & video |
Mike Vernazza, MAV Cinema

This no-expense-spared castles & dragons fantasy realm is also a no-holds-barred home theater

by Dennis Burger
December 15, 2022

The owner of this fantasy-themed room in the Nashville area had previously made headlines with a home cinema inspired by his love of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Starting from scratch in a new theater for a new home, though, he wanted to try something just a bit different. When he approached Richard Charschan, president and CEO of AcousticSmart Home Theatre Interiors, to begin the discussions that eventually led to this space, he decided he wanted to add elements from another beloved epic, The Lord of the Rings, to the design. But just as importantly, according to Charschan, “He wanted it to be a little Disney-like, akin to the themed lines at Disney World that make you forget where you are and prepare the viewer for a whole new experience.”

photos & video |
Mike Vernazza, MAV Cinema

As the room’s design evolved, Charschan and his team also made modifications to account for the homeowner’s vast hoard of collectibles—including converting what was originally conceived as a gym behind the room into a showcase for some of his favorite pieces.

One of the most distinctive elements, though, is a pair of TVs installed in portrait mode on the side wall to mimic castle windows built into a custom window frame. The real magic comes from a macro that triggers a script on the room’s Kaleidescape movie server so that before a movie starts, the lights dim and dragons appear on the screen, looking like they’re attacking the castle from outside. “The idea was to mimic the end of Game of Thrones, where they’re looking out of the castle and the dragons are blowing everything up,” Charschan said. “He’s big into dragons so we wanted to make it seem like they were really outside. It’s only for a few seconds, just to give you a taste of the entertainment experience to come.”

The literal centerpiece of the room, though, is the two rows of custom seating, three to a row. The owner wanted seating fit for a castle and worked with Charschan on the sketches that would then lead to photorealistic renderings and eventually the final design. Perfecting the design, which also incorporated the owner’s family insignia embroidered on each chair, was no easy task, especially given that the seats feature articulating headrests and a low-profile design that doesn’t block the sound from the surround speakers. “He’s an audiophile,” Charschan said, “so he wouldn’t accept something that interfered with his surround sound.”

Nashville Modern

But just as important was the comfort of the seating. “Toward the end of the project, he started to express concerns about whether the chairs would be comfortable enough since he’d never had a chance to sit in them beforehand. To ensure the seating exceeded expectations, we hand-selected every different piece of foam and made sure every aspect of his seat was ergonomically perfect for him. That’s the kind of thing you can only get from a custom house like ours.”

Along with amping up the design, the owner also wanted to take the performance of the theater to a new level—literally. While his previous cinema boasted a 7.2-channel speaker system by Pro Audio Technology, with this room he wanted a Dolby Atmos system to extend the surround-sound experience into the height domain. New audio processing by Storm Audio and a new Pro Audio Technology Atmos speaker system—installed by Jacob Abbott of Visual Concepts and tuned by Pro Audio’s Mark Goldman—accomplished this goal.

The cinema may look like a somewhat compromised acoustical environment what with the castle-themed stone walls and floors. But as it turns out, most of that stone isn’t stone at all. “The walls are made out of acoustically transparent fabric we call Smart Art,” Charschan said. “It looks so real because we loaded the images into 3D Studio Max to upgrade the depth and resolution to get the detail just right. It took us a little over two months to get it perfect. Even when you’re sitting in the room, you don’t realize it’s not real stone.”

The printed Smart Art fabric also hides a mix of absorptive and diffusive acoustic treatments, which were selected and specified to account for the fact that the floor is made up of hard surfaces featuring a faux stone concept. “We installed stamped concrete that made you feel like you’re really walking into a castle. In the type of environment we were trying to replicate, you wouldn’t have carpeting, so we carved the concrete to look like stone and also incorporated some family insignias into the flooring.”

The more sonically reflective surfaces of the floor were then carefully factored into the acoustical analysis of the space, and the team compensated by adding extra absorption into the walls and ceiling, including heavy draperies. “As long as you take the square footage of the space into account and know how much absorption you need, you can calculate the reverb time correctly with a complicated environment like this,” Charschan said. “The one thing you have to be careful about is going too far the other way. Too much absorption and the room can sound way too dead, even with concrete floors. But this one worked out nicely because luckily the shape is a nice long rectangular shape with decent height.”

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.

Deschamps on Design: Proper Planning

Deschamps on Design | Proper Planning

more Deschamps on Design

Why Not Wallpaper?

Better Sound Through Design

Star Gazing

Creating with Light

Taking the right steps at the very beginning of a home theater design will save both time & money and help ensure you get the room you want

by Maria Deschamps
December 14, 2022

Adequate planning is the key to having an exceptional home theater—and the key to adequate planning is to bring in an interior designer who specializes in home theater design from the very beginning of the project. As a designer who specializes in that area, I find I am often hired after many vital decisions have already been made. But having all the right professionals in place from the start ensures that the process will be both straightforward and cost-efficient. Proper planning also helps to create a more harmonious and pleasant working environment.

With many of my projects, the home has already been built and the theater design has been left until the end, or I have been hired during construction. About 90% of my new clients retained me because they realized the designer who was doing the rest of their home wasn’t the right person to do the theater. But often, key structural elements are already in place by the time I’m brought in, which means the client has to either accept significant compromises or make major changes to the surrounding spaces.

A designer who specializes in home theaters will have essential knowledge of these rooms that regular interior designers often do not because they’re rarely asked to do spaces like these. A home theater designer will be able to calculate the proper viewing distances so you’ll be able to maximize your screen size. They will also establish the correct angles for placing speakers to create an immersive sound experience. And they will be able to work in tandem with your custom integrator to optimize both. The important point is that things like these should be determined before beginning the interior design concept for the room.

Also consider retaining an acoustic designer, who can not only determine how to prevent sound from bleeding out of and into the room but also how to make your theater sound its best. Since the placement and incorporation of acoustical treatments can have a big impact on a theater’s design, treatments need to be decided on before I can begin to develop an effective design concept.

In two recent projects, both clients had engaged a non-specialized designer to completely renovate their basements, which included adding a home theater. In each case, I was brought in during construction, after the theater design had been finished. Not only had viewing distances, speaker placement, and acoustic treatments been ignored but insufficient space had been allowed for seating and for placing the projector. Remedying these issues meant tearing down existing walls and redesigning ceiling areas adjacent to the theater.

These kinds of drastic changes were bad enough, but colleagues have told me about situations where they had to dig out an area 6 feet deeper than the original room in order to achieve the correct ceiling height or needed to move structural columns to create the proper viewing angle. All of this could have been avoided if a home theater designer had been involved before any of the work had begun.

The money that goes into fixing avoidable mistakes could have instead gone into improving the experience of the theater by upgrading the quality of the audio and video gear, buying motorized custom leather seating with heating and massage functions, or even adding a complete bar area to the theater. When I recently bumped into a client and asked him how he liked his theater, he said, “I love it—it’s my favorite room of the house. But I wish we had built that bar you suggested.”

Engaging the right theater designer and custom integrator at the start of a project helps to ensure that everyone wins, resulting in a room that comes with a minimum of headaches and delivers the maximum of pleasure.

Maria Deschamps is a certified Interior Designer, IDC, NCIDQ, APDIQ and has been designing home theaters and media rooms since the year 2000. She also designs high-end residential, restaurant, and commercial spaces, and is a partner at TKG, the Theo Kalomirakis Group.

How to Find the Perfect Integrator

Spanish Treasure

theater designer

Lisa Slayman ASID, IIDA

Slayman Cinema
Slayman Design Associates Inc.

spanish treasure

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

by Michael Gaughn photos | Eric Figge Photography

November 30, 2022

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.

This story is also unusual because the client, a Los Angeles attorney with extensive real-estate experience, was not only willing but eager to share his experiences. He and his wife, a well-known Broadway producer, brought an exceptionally broad knowledge of design, movies, theater, and technology to the endeavor, and were happy to roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the project’s three-year duration.

The client—let’s call him “Tony R.”—wasn’t new to private cinemas, having had a succession of them in his Mandeville Canyon home. His most recent one had been a smallish room off the pool house, meant mainly for use by his children. But as they grew up and moved out, Tony and his wife decided to do a far more ambitious theater that was not only spacious—able to accommodate 16—but a true digital cinema that could show first-run movies via the Bel-Air Circuit.

One of Tony’s main requirements was that he didn’t want the usual home theater shoebox. But once the area of the existing theater was excavated to make room for the larger space, it turned out a traditional rectangle probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. After digging down 35 feet, they arrived at an area that was, to put it kindly, not only unusually shaped but literally etched in stone since excavating further would have compromised the foundation of the home. The result mandated a hexagonal, somewhat wedge-shaped room that had to fight to achieve any kind of symmetry.

This theater room carries over the Moorish design style of the rest of the home while adding an abundance of appropriately theatrical touches

cineluxe showcase

Secret Cinema

Achieving Serenity

Inside the Ultimate
Home Entertainment Space

Excavating as far as possible beneath the three-story home resulted in what the owner describes as “a really weird-shaped room” that created significant design and acoustical challenges

click on the image to enlarge

the ceiling of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes, Toldeo Spain

Mudéjar, Briefly

Cribbing from Wikipedia and elsewhere, I can tell you that “Mudéjar” refers to a Late Medieval style of art produced by Muslims who stayed after the Iberian kingdoms had been reclaimed by the Christians but who didn’t convert to Christianity. The term is somewhat derogatory, derived from an Arabic word for “tamed” and was meant to refer to the Christians allowing the Muslims to remain in their lands.

The Mudéjar style is mainly defined by the incorporation of Islamic elements into Christian architecture and art. The style can also involve using building materials like wood not only structurally but decoratively.

Mudéjar was brought to Spanish regions in the Americas during the 16th century by Christian craftsmen and can be found throughout the former Spanish empire

—M.G.

“If you can start from scratch, you can really pin down what you want the room to be, both design-wise and with the technology for the sound and video,” Tony said. “This room was totally the opposite. There are no parallel walls. The ceiling and floor height needed attention, for lack of a better word. It was just a really weird-shaped room.”

Confronted with this jigsaw-puzzle space, he retained designer Lisa Slayman (ASID, IIDA) who has a storied reputation for creating sumptuous but not garish private cinemas. The room presented Lisa with some formidable challenges, but the biggest, literally, was a 30-foot-long 18-inch-wide I-beam that, supporting a wall above the space, ran right through the middle of the proposed area. Rather than try to minimize the beam’s presence, she decided to embrace it and make it the inspiration for her design.

The “A-ha!” moment was when Lisa realized that, by referencing Mudéjar art—an ornate style that emerged in the late Middle Ages in Spain as Islamic influences began to permeate Christian culture—she could both integrate the beam and stay true to the Moorish look of the rest of the home. Creating the kind of intricate decorative ceiling Mudéjar is known for would allow for the introduction of a series of faux beams spoking away from the boxed-in I-beam. And it would allow her to apply crest-like graphics that would not only tie the room in with the style of the home but allow her to personalize the design.

Lisa then sought out Ojai-based artist Robert Walker to paint all the various symbols, which were chosen in collaboration with the clients, who used them as an opportunity to express their heritage. “He actually hand-painted every panel,” Lisa said. “When you look up at the ceiling, they’re all a tiny bit different. So they really do look authentic.” Everyone was impressed with the result—even the artist. “I said to the gentleman, ‘You have to sign this,’” remembered Tony. “And he said, ‘What are you nuts? Of course I’m going to sign it. I’m not going to let someone else steal my work.’”

The ceiling design also served to conceal the height speakers for the Dolby Atmos surround system. The usual solution would have been to place the speakers in can-type fixtures or hide them behind neutral pieces of cloth, but Lisa took it in a more innovative direction, silk-screening some of the symbols onto fabric that was then integrated into the ceiling in a kind of trompe l’oeil effect. Tony said, “I tell guests, ‘Yeah, there’s speakers in the ceiling. Show me where they are.’ Nine out of 10 can’t find them.”

It’s easy to become fixated on the ceiling—which guests to the theater inevitably do—but the room is brimming with other design elements that exhibit just as much inventiveness and discreet panache—like the arched alcoves on the side and back walls that conceal the surround speakers. Rather than go with the usual acoustically transparent fabric, Lisa proposed woven horsehair, a much more expensive solution but one that melded better with the color and texture of the room. And then there are the wrought-iron grilles—another design element carried over from elsewhere in the home, but something you rarely—or never—come across in a private theater.

Making a dynamic statement out of a necessity, the theater’s ceiling uses sleight of hand to obscure the presence of a 30-foot structural steel beam, with the ceiling area between the various beams, faux and real, filled with custom, hand-painted emblems inspired by Late Medieval Mudéjar art

Introducing as much texture as possible was key to creating the desired Old World feel, and you can also see it in things like the ledged brick beneath the alcoves; the distressed thick-plank theater doors with their flat-iron straps; the scalloped Austrian-shade-style silk curtain for the 16-foot projection screen; and the hand-troweled acoustical plaster. “I didn’t want to do a covering all over the walls or a stretching fabric system, like most theaters,” Lisa said. “I wanted the Spanish look of the hard-surface stucco material. The troweled-on plaster gave us that look.”

Because she was proposing so many unusual design solutions, Lisa did mockups so the clients wouldn’t be surprised once everything was in place. “I had them made for everything I picked for that room. But they weren’t tiny little samples—you know, 6 inches big. We would do a wall section or whatever it was, so they could get a feel of seeing it in the space and on the area.”

Having appropriate lighting was also key to maintaining that “maybe we’re in a castle in Spain” effect. “It was really important for me not to have harsh, cold LED lighting because it wouldn’t give it that feeling like you’re in an old space,” Lisa said. “The lighting dials down to 1,200 Kelvin, which is candlelight.” She wanted to keep the fixtures not just unobtrusive but all but invisible. ”If you look in that room, you really don’t see lights because there’s a lot of indirect lighting hidden behind the arches or behind different places. I didn’t want to walk in and see sconces on the wall or downlights—things like that.” The one truly distinctive, but still restrained, lighting touch is the ceiling fixture at the intersection of the beams, with its wrought-iron grille over backlit leaded glass.

Executing a theater this elaborate and intricate inevitably led to tradeoffs between the room’s design and the performance of its audio video system. “Compromises between design and technology almost always favor design,” Tony said, “because to make even an incremental leap in the performance of something like the sound is so expensive. No one other than a seasoned professional is going to notice that tiny improvement. So we always opted in favor of the design as long as the sound achieved an acceptable level, because if we had opted for the sound instead, the design would have taken a major hit, and we weren’t willing to do that.” But he and his wife have no regrets. “Is it the perfect room in terms of design? Yes. Is it perfect in terms of everything? No. But we’re OK with that.”

With a private cinema like this one at his disposal, Tony doesn’t see any reason to patronize commercial theaters. “Certainly the sound is not going to be any better. The comfort is not going to be any better. And the bar’s not going to be any closer.” But he does make one exception. “I’d carve out IMAX because that’s a unique experience.”

Many people would consider having a certified digital cinema with its entrée to the Bel-Air Circuit the ultimate way to watch movies at home, so it was surprising to hear that Tony has become disenchanted with what the Circuit has to offer. “I thought that would be of huge importance to us but in the end it wasn’t. We just don’t need that anymore.” His next big project is to optimize the theater for playback from sources like streaming and Kaleidescape.

Other than that, Tony and his wife couldn’t be happier with what Lisa created for them. “The conclusion of your article should say, under no circumstances should you hire any designer other than Lisa Slayman to do your project.”

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.

theater designer

Lisa Slayman ASID, IIDA

Slayman Cinema
Slayman Design Associates Inc.

Hidden Treasure

hidden
treasure

getting the private cinema profiled in spanish treasure to sound its best meant digging deep into the tricks of the acoustic trade

BY DENNIS BURGER

November 30, 2022

“The eye doesn’t always tell you the flavor of the room,” says Anthony Grimani, former director of technology for THX and founder of Performance Media Industries, who was responsible for making this gorgeous private cinema sound the way it sounds.

This was in response to a pretty simple but open-ended question from me: “How?”

How, for example, does this space feature a complete Dolby Atmos sound system with six overhead speakers—not to mention 11 ear-level speakers and four powerful subwoofers—when a quick glance at the ceiling reveals not merely a complete lack of obvious speaker grilles but rows upon rows of hand-painted and antiqued wooden panels adorned with crests instead?

How does the tryptic back wall, with a shape not unlike the outfield wall of a baseball stadium, not reflect and concentrate sound back toward the seating area like a satellite dish? How, for that matter, do all the plaster and brick walls not create the sort of echoey and reverberant sound you’d typically hear in a room with so many hard surfaces? Look around and you’ll see none of the heavily draperied walls or acoustical treatments typically found all over private cinema spaces.

Spanish Treasure

project team

acoustical designer

Anthony Grimani
Performance Media Industries

custom integrator

Bradford Wells
Bradford Wells & Associates

architect

Wylie Carter Architects

theater designer

Lisa Slayman
Slayman Cinema

contractor

Paldino Architects & Construction

“The surfaces in this room are not what they appear to be,” Grimani says. Starting from the top, he tells me that a number of the wooden crests in the ceiling were “knocked out, photographed, printed with dye sublimation onto an acoustically transparent fabric, then repositioned. Some of those panels hid speakers. Some of them hid acoustical treatments. So, half the ceiling is wood and the other half is fake, but you can’t tell. You walk in the room and the printing is so well-executed that it just looks real. To the naked eye, there’s just no way to know.”

In a sense, all of this makes this room a truly apt metaphor for cinema at its best. Like movies themselves, this private screening room relies on visual trickery and a lot of technical wizardry—special effects, if you will. And as with cinema, the best visual effects are the ones you don’t even realize are visual effects. They’re the ones you take for granted.

Take the matter of acoustical treatments around the room as another example. Any good screening room needs the right balance of two types of treatment, referred to as “absorption” and “diffusion.” In practice, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but if you understand those two concepts, you’re at least conversant in the fundamentals of what makes some rooms sound good and others sound less good, at least for the purposes of watching films.

Acoustical plaster gives the impression of being a typical stucco surface but actually allows sound to pass through to materials meant absorb and reflect sound, located beneath

also on Cineluxe

Rooms for Improvement

Million-Dollar Wall,
Hundred-Dollar Sound

Without enough absorption, a room will sound like a basketball court, more so the more reflective surfaces it has. Too much absorption, though, and it starts to sound dead and lifeless—perhaps even a bit unnerving.

And not only is finding the right amount of absorption important; you also need to distribute your absorptive sound treatments evenly around the room. Absorb too much sound in the front or rear, Grimani says, and “your ear/brain senses that as a black hole of sound energy; your attention is drawn to it. It doesn’t match our auditory radar. So it’s better to have a layout where the absorption is consistently distributed all the way around the room.”

You also want to create some diffusion—or scattering—of the sound that would otherwise reflect directly off the hard surfaces of the room. The placement of these diffusive treatments is equally important. “Some diffusion on the lateral surfaces on the side walls is good,” Grimani says, “since it gives you a sensation that the room is bigger than it really is.” Too much diffusion in the wrong places, though, and it “confuses the hell out of your senses.”

As for the physical makeup of these treatments, there’s a range of materials used to create absorption and diffusion—but nowhere on that list will you find plaster or brick. So where did they hide the treatments in this room? Behind the plaster. Behind the brick. And no, that didn’t involve dye-sub printing fabric panels to look like plaster and brick.

“The magic we used here was something called Baswa Phon acoustical plaster,” Grimani says. “The idea is that you lay up a few inches of relatively dense fiberglass or rockwool, then you trowel on this porous plaster, which lets the sound through. So while your eyes see plaster, the sound waves pass right through it and get soaked up by the fibrous material. So that’s part of the trickery.”

The brick walls along the sides and rear also hide secrets—in the back of the room specifically, two large subwoofers positioned and calibrated to complement another two subs behind the screen at the front. “You can’t tell from the pictures but the grout between the bricks was selected for its porousness,” Grimani says. “We also have fiberglass put right behind the grout. The area between the bricks is actually absorptive, so while this all looks like hard surfaces that would be a giant amplifying echo box—a parabola focusing all these reflections back at you—the room actually has a very natural acoustic character.”

The other key to making this room sound the way it does was reliance on Grimani Systems’ own powered speakers, which he convinced integrator Bradford Wells to use after a private audition. (In fact, it was Wells who brought Grimani into this project and handled all of the client interaction.) The speakers were engineered with spaces like this in mind. Due to their design, Grimani has precise control over how each driver in each speaker interacts with the other, which gives him more control over how each speaker delivers sound into the room. The goal is to make sure that whether you’re listening to the speaker from directly in front of it or off to the side, it doesn’t sound radically different.

This means that any sound that does bounce off the walls, ceiling, and floor has the same character as the sound reaching your ears directly. “What’s more important than focusing on the Grimani Systems label on these speakers,” he tells me, “is to state the importance of having a speaker with even sound power. That will help ensure good sonic results”

The state-of-the-art speaker system, the room tuning, the hidden acoustics, the climate control vents engineered to keep air velocity low to minimize the noise therefrom—all of it adds up to just one piece of the puzzle that makes this room work. Probably the most important piece is the collaborative effort of all the trades involved in the project.

“All successful theaters have to exist as the perfect combination of beautiful architecture, gorgeous design, and meticulous engineering,” Grimani says, “so that the picture and sound are all reference quality—meaning that a film director and sound mixer could come in and say, ‘Yep! That’s the picture and sound as I created them.’ The room also has to be carefully built to follow the rules set forth by the engineering and design and architecture. The team has to work together as a group to make that happen. Pull all that off and you end up with a crazy-happy client.”

So was the client crazy-happy? I couldn’t help but ask.

“It’s funny,” Grimani replies. “He said he originally thought he’d use the room once or twice a month but he’s down there every night.”

Spanish Treasure

“All successful theaters have to exist as the perfect combination of beautiful architecture, gorgeous design, and meticulous engineering.”

Survival of the Savviest

“I don’t think I need to show any examples of the kinds of rooms I’m talking about. Everyone’s walked one of these crime scenes at some point in their life.”

The responsibility for creating entertainment spaces has traditionally fallen on the person least capable of doing the job—until now

by Michael Gaughn
September 29, 2022

For decades, the person with the most sway over the look of the entertainment spaces in most homes has been the one with the weakest sense of design—or no design sense at all. And I’m not just talking mass-market man caves but high-end home theaters, (the miserably named) media rooms, and other places where people like to enjoy their games, music, movies, and series.

And by design sense, I’m not talking the ability to make bold statements. An asset elsewhere in the home, those showier traits tend to be a negative in spaces where the room shouldn’t be allowed to overwhelm the experience. I’m just talking about what’s appropriate—what’s judicious and shows taste; what’s apt.

Interior designers are partly to blame for this hegemony. Traditionally tech averse, they far too easily ceded their ground here—which has been especially unfortunate because these spaces, with all their screens and devices and control, are essentially harbingers of what the entire home will soon be. Better to figure out now how to keep them from looking like domestic outliers than to have to tackle them later as a fait accompli.

So these design chores have too often fallen on the custom integrator instead. But expecting the average AV guy to bring some tact and flair to the proceedings is kind of like letting your lawn crew plan your daughter’s wedding. The parts of the brain needed to run wire, decipher specs, patch together a system, and calibrate a room don’t tend to be on speaking terms with the areas needed to fully grasp a client’s lifestyle or empathize with their more subtle aesthetic needs—essential traits for being able to create a suitable, inviting space that doesn’t feel utterly alien from the rest of the home.

brain needed to run wire, decipher specs, patch together a system, and calibrate a room don’t tend to be on speaking terms with the areas needed to fully grasp a client’s lifestyle or empathize with their more subtle aesthetic needs—essential traits for being able to create a suitable, inviting space that doesn’t feel utterly alien from the rest of the home.

The Last Days of the Man Cave

gear as possible into a room with little concern for its impact on the experience or the space caused architects and designers who could have helped smooth the waters to throw up their hands and walk away.

I don’t think I need to show any examples of the kinds of rooms I’m talking about. Everyone’s walked one of these crime scenes at some point in their life. The number of atrocities committed in the name of home theater is so massive it warrants a war crimes tribunal.

But this once dire situation is changing for the better—and fast—as a new generation of architects and designers emerges that, having been weaned on

The most positive way to spin all this is to say integrators jumped into the breach because no one else wanted to take on the job, and there’s more than a little truth to that. Less charitably, it could be said that their zeal to pile as much gear as possible into a room with little concern for its impact on the experience or the space caused architects and designers who could have helped smooth the waters to throw up their hands and walk away.

But this once dire situation is changing for the better—and fast—as a new generation of architects and designers emerges that, having been weaned on lifestyle tech, no longer views it as the enemy—but also doesn’t stroke it as a fetish—and knows how to make it feel like a not just unintrusive but organic part of the home.

Achieving Serenity

lifestyle tech, no longer views it as the enemy—but also doesn’t stroke it as a fetish—and knows how to make it feel like a not just unintrusive but organic part of the home.

Flexible, innovative private cinemas like the one featured in “Achieving Serenity” show just how fluid this has all become. Architect Ty Harrison also functioned as the lead designer—which, in a home that ambitious, meant also having to have a good grasp of how to integrate sophisticated and elaborate enough entertainment systems to satisfy the client’s needs. He then brought in the right integrator to make all the behind-the-scenes

technical stuff happen, who in turn assembled the right team of specialists to handle things like the acoustics and calibration.

That is how it should be—an architect or interior designer attuned to the client’s lifestyle who can then translate their desires structurally, technically, and aesthetically.

I’m not saying there are no integrators capable of rising to the challenge, just that the hopeless gear-heads among them should never be allowed within striking

distance of a book of swatches. The exceptions tend to be members of the emerging generation, with some functioning basically as design firms that are also able to handle the tech—like the British outfit Equippd, profiled in “Secret Cinema.” As up on look and feel as they are on gear, they always place the latter clearly in the service of the former. And because they get design and know how to make it exciting without letting it overwhelm an entertainment space, it’s something they can offer enthusiastically, not grudgingly or ineptly.

Thanks to the ascendance of these tech-savvy architects

That is how it should be—an architect or interior designer attuned to the client’s lifestyle who can then translate their desires structurally, technically, and aesthetically.

I’m not saying there are no integrators capable of rising to the challenge, just that the hopeless gear-heads among them should never be allowed within striking distance of a book of swatches. The exceptions tend to be members of the emerging generation, with some functioning basically as design firms that are also able to handle the tech—like the British outfit Equippd, profiled in “Secret Cinema.” As up on look and feel as they are on gear, they always place the latter clearly in the service of the former. And because they get design and know how to make it exciting without letting it overwhelm an entertainment space, it’s something they can offer enthusiastically, not grudgingly or ineptly.

Secret Cinema

Thanks to the ascendance of these tech-savvy architects and designers, and a small but growing coterie of integrators, entertainment spaces are, after far too long, becoming congruent with people’s expectations and how they actually live their lives. We’re far from free of the butt-crack brigade and their zeal for pushing tweaked-out unloved and unlovely rumpus rooms, but the glow of their pocket flashes is waning fast. There will always be a need to have someone run wire—the same way you’ll always need a plumber. But design will never be the AV guy’s strong suit and the coming paradigm shift will not only open up fertile new territory but help finally restore the natural order of things.

and designers, and a small but growing coterie of integrators, entertainment spaces are, after far too long, becoming congruent with people’s expectations and how they actually live their lives. We’re far from free of the butt-crack brigade and their zeal for pushing tweaked-out unloved and unlovely rumpus rooms, but the glow of their pocket flashes is waning fast. There will always be a need to have someone run wire—the same way you’ll always need a plumber. But design will never be the AV guy’s strong suit and the coming paradigm shift will not only open up fertile new territory but help finally restore the natural order of things.

Nashville Modern

photos & video | Mike Vernazza

A radical home theater makeover results in a sleek, minimalist, very of-the-moment entertainment space

by Lisa Montgomery
September 30, 2022

For nearly a decade, the theater occupying the lower level of a luxury Nashville residence entertained its owners with exceptional AV. But much of that theater’s décor and equipment had gone unchanged and eventually untouched as the room aged.

Still, the bones were solid, the space ideally located, and measuring roughly 800 square feet, bursting with potential. The new owner of the residence had a grand plan to bring the home theater back en vogue and unparalleled. From top to bottom and with the help of professional home theater designers and integrators, he would revive the room, embarking on a dramatic transformation with the goal of creating a sensational, luxuriously appointed space.

photos & video | Mike Vernazza

Out went the traditional furnishings and antiquated AV components and in went a new, contemporary interior and state-of-the-art system. Walls were stripped down to the studs, giving the designers at AcousticSmart Home Theatre Interiors a clean slate upon which to create an ethereal home theater that draws you in with its sleek, modern style and keeps you there with its immersive audio and video performance.

Sure, a larger-than-life screen typically commands the most attention in a home theater but there’s no reason there can’t be other eye candy to admire. Here, wooden columns and a coffered ceiling were replaced with gracefully curved walls and a fiber-optic ceiling infused with twinkling constellations and shooting stars. Traditional incandescent light fixtures made way for adjustable LED colored lighting. Overstuffed, out-of-date seats were traded up for supportive leather Cinemaloungers and motorized chairs. Modern barstools and a granite countertop were added to the back of the room for additional seating, evoking a swank cocktail-lounge vibe.

fixtures made way for adjustable LED colored lighting. Overstuffed, out-of-date seats were traded up for supportive leather Cinemaloungers and motorized chairs. Modern barstools and a granite countertop were added to the back of the room for additional seating, evoking a swank cocktail-lounge vibe.

From top to bottom, the theater was realigned, reshaped, and revitalized. “The owner’s mission was to model the room after a project we had posted on Instagram,” says AcousticSmart president and CEO Richard Charschan. “This gave us a great starting point on which to base our design, but we made sure to add several special touches to keep the aesthetic fresh and distinctive.”

Complementing the striking cosmetics are a host of installation techniques and cutting-edge technologies applied to channel the owners’ requisite “suspension of disbelief.” For example, it might be hard to believe that speakers tucked behind breathable fabric walls can produce the realistic, three-dimensional audio of a Dolby Atmos surround-sound system. Or that the massive 17-foot diagonal screen can skim the lines of a 10-foot wall, but it does. AcousticSmart and the systems integration team at Professional Audio Video Engineering curated the products, engineered the acoustics, and thoughtfully integrated the right technology to turn some of the best AV components available into seamless facets of the room environment. It all fits together in a clean, minimalist design package that you have to see and hear to believe—just what the owner ordered.

With more than 20 years under her belt covering all things electronic for the home, Lisa Montgomery has developed a knack for knowing what types of products and systems make sense for homeowners looking to update their abodes. When she’s not exploring innovative ways to introduce technology into homes, Lisa breaks away from the electronics world on a bike, kayak, or a towel on the beach.

The Last Days of the Man Cave

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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.

“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.”

Deschamps on Design: Why Not Wallpaper?

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Omexco’s natural, recycled sari silk, handwoven paper strings, and raffia made with artisanal techniques

Wall coverings have evolved so far from their wallpaper past that they now offer a vast, unexplored world in private cinema design

by Maria Deschamps
September 9, 2022

Wallpaper has come a long way since the thin papery material, busy with flowers or paisleys, our grandparents used in their homes. There is now so much more to discover with almost infinite variations, including customization. Most people wouldn’t even consider adding a wallpaper to a home theater but with all the new options, it’s really hard to resist.

The negative connotations of wallpaper are so strong that some of my clients simply cringe when I say the word. But if I say “wall covering” instead, they suddenly become more inquisitive. And when I present samples of textured wall covering, they begin to see that there are possibilities beyond traditional wallpaper and lose their ambivalence.

I love color, I love pattern, I love texture, and when these elements are combined in the right way, it is the ultimate choice for me. Textured coverings are my favorite. By using a thick velvet, velour, or corduroy, an entertainment space can be transformed into an entirely new atmosphere. These coverings create warmth and intimacy. They also often have acoustic properties that reduce reverberations or echoes—obviously a major consideration when designing a home theater.

Corduroy patterns with wide or narrow lines in dark colors are perfect for a theater room. When used vertically, they give the illusion the ceiling is higher since vertical lines create height. (Conversely, horizontal lines make a room look wider.) Corduroy gives a wall a soft comfy feeling, and when we look at it or touch it, we feel warm and cozy.

Velour wall coverings now have reliefs and can be found with many different geometrical patterns and shapes. There are even ones that mimic wall panels or wainscoting. These can be used to emphasize an area of a room or a focal point on a wall and give depth.

Another favorite form of wall covering with amazing acoustic properties are the ones made of cork—yes, cork! This material is not only environmentally friendly, it’s designed with multiple colors and textures, and can even have patterns with sparkle.

Speaking of wall coverings that sparkle: One of my home theater clients insisted I design a new bedroom for their 11 year old, who was moving from one end of the house to the other and dreaded the relocation. To motivate her to make the move, I had to design something spectacular so I used a magnificent multicolored wall covering full of sparkles and glitter that lit up the wall behind her bed. When she saw the room complete, it made her feel like a real princess, and the room became bright and beautiful, just like her.

Different patterns are plentiful. One trend is foliage—lots of plants and big leaves. Another is animals, a jungle look with exotic birds. Patterns like these can be an exciting choice to use in an area like a home theater foyer.

Grass cloth has also made a comeback and is now available in many colors and textures. It is even available with metallic accents. Silks are a sexy way to go. Wall coverings with smooth metallic shiny finishes with 3D effects are an amazing complement to a modern space—a perfect choice to give a theater’s rear wall some interest.

What I love most about wall coverings is that they can just be in the background. They don’t have to have a big pattern that stands out. Using an elegant texture on a wall instead of paint gives dimension and will produce a sophisticated look.

The options are nearly infinite. For a price, some manufacturers will customize a covering, allowing you to have a personalized color and pattern—the ultimate for exclusive design.

The best way to make a covering work well is to not only select the right one but to also place it on the appropriate wall. Where you enter a room determines which wall is the focal point. Most often, this is the wall I would select to create an impact with wall covering.

Here’s my take: Think outside of the box and discover the many new options that exist and give wall coverings a chance. You won’t be disappointed!

above | when the projection screen is raised, a TV is revealed, backed by a cork wall covering with acoustic properties

Secret Cinema

Belgian manufacturer Omexco offers many options of eco-friendly cork wall coverings with metallic details or printed designs

foliage, a jungle look, exotic birds, animals, and colorful plants are possibilities for a home theater foyer (Arte International)

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.

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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

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Acoustic panels, imaginatively deployed, can be the difference between a great- and terrible-sounding room

by Maria Deschamps
July 26, 2022

About the only people who really get excited about discussing acoustic treatments are acousticians. With clients, treatments are way down at the bottom of the list, below deciding what type of pad to use under the carpet. But treatments make a huge difference in the sound quality of a room—and, while they have a reputation for being unsightly, that really doesn’t matter because they can be inconspicuous when properly designed.

Given that, why oh why are luxury theater designers just installing acoustic panels on top of their drywall? I have seen far too many installs of 24 x 48-inch panels directly on a wall or ceiling, either in a theater or music studio—and they are uggg-ly! As a consequence, a lot of my new clients say to me “Do we have to have acoustic panels?” and my response is “Yes, you do, but we can make them part of the design, either by hiding them completely or by dressing them up so you’ll never know they’re acoustic panels.”

Certainly, hiding the panels by installing them behind a stretch-fabric system is a much better and cleaner alternative. In that case, all of the panels are hidden—no one sees them so you don’t have to worry about what they look like. Because of that, it doesn’t matter what color or texture they are. A stretch fabric is indeed the preferred solution for acousticians since they can install as many panels or baffles as they need and put them wherever they want. The speakers are also hidden behind the fabric, and the nice thing is that the result is a clean, flat surface.

Stretch fabric systems aren’t for everyone, however, and it’s not as easy as you would think to find a fabric that meets all the technical criteria acousticians require, like elasticity, acoustic transparency, breathability, and opacity. Imagine, we must start with these requirements and then make sure the acoustically transparent fabric also meets the design concept and color criteria that satisfy the designer and client.

This Maria-designed home theater uses custom-designed round acoustic panels accented by LED strip lighting

CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO ENLARGE

One thing is for certain: Acoustic panels are a must in a home theater. They reduce reverberation and minimize noise pollution. They play a major roll in increasing sound quality—not to be confused with sound isolation, which is what keeps the sound inside from traveling outside of your theater and vice versa. When designing a theater, we need to specify and design surfaces that reflect and surfaces that absorb sound. Acoustic panels absorb sound. They are made mostly of fiberglass and come in several thicknesses.

What I love about these panels is that they’re easily customizable. Although they still need to be covered with an acoustically transparent fabric, we can use another finish—like a sexy wall covering—next to them. Using different finishes gives us more possibilities to create an interesting concept. We can make them any size or shape and we can place a long run of several panels side by side with an inconspicuous joint. Once the exact locations of the surround speakers are determined, we can design the panels to hide the speakers behind them. We can also layer panels on top of each other to increase the density and functionality as well as create design interest. Finally, we can carve out recesses on the edges of panels to hide LED strip lights—and you know how much I love indirect lighting!

My take is that creativity is paramount in a private theater, so the space should be distinctive and authentic. Technical elements like acoustic panels shouldn’t inhibit design creativity, and by customizing them they can really be part of the “Wow!” factor. So please, no more 24 x 48-inch wall panels—design something magnificent!

For this media room, Maria used custom-made acoustic panels with an organic curve along the top with indirect LED strip lighting behind

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