Home Movie Theaters

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.

The music industry has the Grammys to recognize outstanding contributions to the art of song composition. The Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association, aka CEDIA, which you might know from our coverage of the annual CEDIA Expo, has the Electronic Lifestyles Awards to honor the creativity and technical skill behind some of the most advanced home entertainment and home automation systems on the planet. Here we profile two of the 14 home theaters that made the cut in 2014.

The owners of this house were building their dream home, with the expectation of fully integrated systems throughout the house, which would include 12 televisions, multiple zones of music, a dedicated theater, interior and exterior lighting, security, and more. This kind of complex whole-home project is nothing new to Electronics Design Group (EDG), of Piscataway Township, New Jersey. However, the challenge here was that the house was over 100 years old and was being rebuilt to keep its early 1900s aesthetics.