Home Movie Theaters

<I>From 30,000 feet to reality. </I>

<I>19 designers, 19 rooms, 1 installer. </I>

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.

<B>The Beginning</B>
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I am an avid do-it-yourselfer, thanks to my father. We did everything around our home together, from electrical to plumbing to construction. I purchased my first home theater receiver in college back in 1989. It was a Kenwood with big and loud Cerwin Vega speakers. For the next several years, I pieced together this system as best I could with what money I had.

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.

Penn Jillette's home theater is, like his entire house, not what you'd expect. The Slammer, a 6,000-square-foot monument to eccentricity and a macabre sense of humor, sprouts out of the Nevada desert a few miles from Las Vegas, where Penn & Teller perform their remarkable feats of illusion nightly at the Rio Hotel & Casino. From the outside, behind a chain-link fence, it looks like a Frank Gehry vision of Blade Runner in pastel. "Frank Lloyd Wrong," someone comments as we drive up to the gate. Within the courtyard, which has seemingly endless new additions under construction to accommodate an 8-month-old daughter and another on the way, multicolored astroturf and red and yellow concrete patios add to the sense that this is as much an adult playground as it is a residence-a very adult playground, given Jillette's well-known affinity for the scatological and the salacious.

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.