Home Movie Theaters

Having lived in our home since 1979, we are the third owners of this tiny 750-square-foot, 1.5 story, 1943 frame bungalow. In 1998 we decided on some major interior and exterior modifications, which I designed and we had done. The exterior changes gave the house a fresh, neomodern look without spoiling the home's original character lines, allowing it to still fit in with our neighborhood. The interior changes opened up our main floor plan. I have since caught the carpentry bug and now design and do my own work.

My interest in home theaters stems from my father. Like anyone brought up by a good father, I wish to be like him and take interest in things that he finds interesting. One hobby of his is audio/video stuff. Several years ago, he turned a little-used living room in the basement of his home into a home theater. He had professional installers do the work, and I was amazed at the results: a drop-down tensioned screen, an HDTV projector, and top-quality picture and sound. I wanted to have a home theater, too. In the middle of my Air Force service at Hill AFB, Utah, my family and I decided to build a home. I had plans to build a dedicated home theater under the garage. Financial issues, including medical-school loans, a family of seven to feed, and limited military income caused these plans to end up on the back burner. Two years later, I finished my military obligation, and we moved to rural Webster, South Dakota. We built a new home, and this time I was determined to make the home theater happen! We designed our own home, and the basement home theater fit right into the plans. I had the contractor lower the foundation 4 feet to give the room some depth. I had read that square rooms are poor choices for home theaters, but, with a degree of oppositional defiance, I set out to make a square 25-by-25-foot home theater.

<I>A wild theater with a sonic edge shows you how to balance acoustics, design, and living space.</I>

I've always loved going to the movies. Most of my childhood Saturday mornings were spent at the Palace Theater in Winchester, Virginia, where I could watch two films, cartoons, a newsreel, a short, and coming attractions&mdash;all for a quarter. About three years ago, I was surfing eBay and ran across a listing for a movie poster from the 1956 horror film The Mole People. I became obsessed with that poster and soon found myself in a fierce bidding war. Later, I realized what was really going on. The Mole People poster had rekindled those childhood memories, and I somehow wanted to go back in time and relive those special Saturdays. That's when I decided to design and build an ornate 1950s style home theater.

Our home theater started out as an unfinished basement room with dimensions of 14 by 18 by 9 feet. The room is rectangular, with three doors and no windows. Audio problems are inherently more difficult to solve than video problems. Fortunately, the room dimensions are friendly to acoustic resonances. Since the theater would be right under the great room of the house, the main goal was to decouple the theater from the rest of the house as best as possible.

Integrating 21st-century home electronics into the architecture of a newly built 18th-century-style Italian villa would, at first glance, appear impossible. After all, about the only thing technological in the 1700s was the nutcracker. Add to this the advanced needs of a tech-savvy young couple who are inspired by the past but make their careers within the computer and video-gaming fields, and you have seemingly irresolvable conflicts. This property's sheer size further magnified the task at hand. It's a three-level, 12,000-square-foot home situated on 2.3 acres in the hills of Southern California. Enter Sound Solutions of Culver City, California, premier systems integrators with a 29-year history and a reception area full of national awards, including&nbsp; Crestron's first annual Biggest, Baddest Home Award and the CEA Mark of Excellence Award, both given for this project.

Maybe it's because one of the owners is an avid comic-book collector. Maybe it's because the owners are the parents of not one but two sets of twins—both under three years of age. Or maybe it's because the room is so perfectly balanced, technically equipped, and ideally soundproofed as to offer a uniquely singular feeling of audio/video perfection. Whatever the reasoning, the term Fortress of Solitude aptly describes this home theater in Greenwich, Connecticut.