Home Movie Theaters

Most of us remember the first time as a kid that seeing a movie had a profound impact on our young mind. For plenty of kids who came of age in the 1970s, that movie was the first episode of the original Star Wars trilogy, which was released in 1977. For Kelly Sterne of Flower Mound, Texas, a fascination with Star Wars led to an obsession...

Do you want to walk into the picture above? We do. In our humble opinion, the latest home theater project from Cobb Home Innovations is hands down one of the most inviting media room spaces we’ve seen. Unlike a traditional home theater with rows of theater-like seating, this room screams “kick off your shoes and get comfortable because your mind is about to be blown.”

When homeowners in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, hired Custom LA to replace the existing home theater in their 6,500-square-foot home, they wanted an advanced system capable of delivering jaw-dropping audio and video performance but it had to be dead simple to operate and capable of controlling AV systems in two other areas of the sprawling home.

Brace yourself for a tour of a most remarkable home theater, built in a 4,000-square-foot basement with an adjacent movie set that celebrates the owner's childhood.

Nestled among the rolling estates of northcentral New Jersey is a recently completed 22,000-square-foot mansion on 11 acres that represents the height of luxury. Among the usual features associated with such homes—the large and well-appointed kitchen with industrial-grade appliances, the sprawling master suite with grand bath and giant hisand-hers walk-in closets, the fully equipped gym area, the climate-controlled wine cellar, the multi-bay garage complex stocked with one or more exotic cars, the attached pool and cabana, and, of course, the dedicated home theater—is the extraordinary media/entertainment space you see here. Dubbed the Sports Room by the homeowner, it’s one of the still rare examples of a commercial video wall used in a residential application, and it is indeed the ultimate game day oasis.

Dolby Atmos, for you members of the unwashed and uninformed masses (yeah, you know who you are), enables film sound designers to treat individual sonic elements as virtual “objects” that can be placed and moved almost anywhere within the three-dimensional space of a movie theater. Two things are important about its adaptation for home theater. First, the soundfield—in its original, discretely encoded version, not an extrapolated one—is no longer limited to a two-dimensional plane circling around your ears.