OTHER TECH

Natasha Richardson looks at fabric samples with interior designer Anthony Cochran.

The same thinking is seen in the decision to put the Runco projector on display on the shelf above the bar instead of boxing it in, as it would be in most installations. Before Chris came on board, Liam and Natasha considered using a smaller, much less powerful projector. But that would have meant suspending it in the middle of the room, over their guests, and it likely still wouldn't have been bright enough for the space.

"I wanted to place the projector on the far side of the room from the screen instead of hanging it over the middle," Chris says.n "But they weren't doing a completely dedicated viewing area, so it wasn't going to be fully dark much of the time. That meant we needed a high-output projector." The Runco produces a plenty-bright-enough 55 footlamberts - sufficient to create a decent image even with ambient daylight in the room.

Meanwhile, placing the in-floor subs was also a challenge because they fire up through a vent. "The location of the furniture, the bar, all the built-ins, the bookshelves, and everything else in the room made it difficult to evenly space the subs," Chris says. "Also, you couldn't have a large grille in the middle of any kind of high-traffic area because people would be stepping on it all the time. But having the two subs in the front of the room, to either side of the center speaker, actually turned out to be a fairly good setup."

Installer Chris Wyllie with the equipment rack, which features a Crestron Adagio system processor.

Although positioning the subs was hard, actually installing them was easy. "That was a pleasure, because the barn has a full walk-through beneath the main floor," Chris says. "You could literally drive a car through there. So we were able to easily bring our material in there, use a ladder, and work like gentlemen. And the subs come completely assembled right out of the box and have very simple instructions, so it's a very user-friendly installation. They can go in the ceiling, too."

Liam and Natasha originally considered having minisystems in the gym and game room, completely independent of the home theater. But Chris showed them that it would be easier to put Sonance iPort in-wall iPod docks in each of the three rooms. That way they could listen to different music in each room or, when they were having a party, play the same music throughout the barn. The Crestron Adagio processor handles all the routing and control.

"The Crestron system let us do 5.2-channel surround sound for the home theater while also providing four stereo audio zones," Chris says. "Along with audio and video, it also gives you full control of the Lutron lighting system. We didn't have to use a separate distributed-audio system, a home theater receiver, a lighting controller, and all these other pieces, because it's all incorporated in that one Crestron unit. This was the simplest all-in-one system we could have put into their room."

I ask Liam if there's anything the system doesn't do that he wants it to. "It doesn't open a bottle of red wine," he says. "But I'm sure that's around the corner."