Home Movie Theaters

<I>How one couple pulled off a home theater that is completely independent from the house in which it resides. </I>

<I>Driven by his passion for movies, this homeowner truly went the distance to create his ideal home theater.</I>

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.

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.

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.

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

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.