OTHER TECH

•Photo Gallery

There's lots more "gee-whiz" sprinkled throughout the house, like computer networking, Wi-Fi, security video cameras - that kind of thing. Gary's particularly psyched that he can turn on his great-room plasma and from there control his TiVo (located in the basement), which can access the hard drive of his laptop (stationed in his first-floor office) to call up family photos (he has two sons, Jackson, 12, and Lucas, 9), which he can then view on said plasma.

And Gary's hardly done yet. "About 7 or 8 months ago, while we were in the process of doing our house, we went over to Mike Smeriglio's place to get some ideas, since they're good friends of ours," he says. (For a look at the Smeriglios' home installation, see Custom Fit.) "We saw their home theater - which I thought was the coolest thing - and, as we were leaving, my wife said to me, 'God, if anybody in this world should have a home theater, it's you.' And she's right. She knows me. I watch a ton of DVDs."

Gary has definitely been bitten hard by the home theater bug. "I think a lot of people get one because, when they're building a big house, they think it's just another element you should have - a status symbol. Some people say to me, 'You're never going to use the home theater.' And I say, 'No, you're talking to the wrong guy.' I'll definitely have the guys down here to watch football. And I get a lot of movies - like, I was sent an Academy screener of Dreamgirls, so we invited some other couples over to watch."

At this point, Gary's trying to figure out exactly where in the basement to build his theater, whether the speakers should be visible or hidden behind a perforated screen, what kind of projector to get - stuff like that.

Still, he might just be most excited by that all-room audio. "I tend to turn it up more when everybody's gone," he says. "We hung a disco ball upstairs in the kids' playroom. When I took my son Lucas up there, I was like, 'Wait - we're going to turn on the ball and the strobe.' And I went over and tuned the satellite radio to the classic disco channel [The Strobe]. We just cranked it, and he was cracking up." All hail the new King.

See the next page for the Equipment List.