 Filed Under: $$$ Installer Profiles Staff Picks Posted Tue Feb 5, 2008, 5:07 PM ET — By Steve Guttenberg
Kipnis' outer limits theater, or what $6 million will buy. When it comes to home theaters, I thought I'd seen it all. But nothing's come close to this. First, I'm going to try to describe the sheer magnitude of Jeremy Kipnis' theater. His Stewart Snowmatte laboratory-grade screen is the biggest I've ever seen in a home, and in the back of the theater, there's a Sony ultra-high-resolution (4,096-by-2,160) SRX-S110 digital projector. I'm looking everywhere, jotting down questions, and Kipnis sounds almost giddy talking about his theater's capabilities. He refers to his baby, the Kipnis Studio Standard (KSS), as "The Greatest Show on Earth." And from the looks of it, he may be right. Filed Under: Pro Interiors $$$ Contemporary Staff Picks Posted Fri Aug 31, 2007, 11:47 AM ET — By Adrienne Maxwell
Nothing is quite as simple as it seems in this award-winning home theater. Don't let this home theater's classic design and clean lines fool you. It may look like a simple rectangular space that houses a high-end audio/video system, but closer inspection reveals that the real technological marvel is the room itself. A tremendous amount of planning, construction, and creativity went into the process of creating an acoustically optimized space that can serve as both a casual reading/viewing room and a thoroughly immersive home theater. Filed Under: Pro Interiors $$$ Traditional Staff Picks Posted Wed Aug 29, 2007, 1:56 AM ET — By Krissy Rushing
How to fit 10 seats in a small room and still get amazing sound. Aspiration and enthusiasm are two of the key things that make a great magazine reader. While many of us read magazines like GQ or Vogue, a lot of us can't necessarily afford the wares we see on those fashionable pages. Why do we read them, then? We read them because we take cues from these highly regarded magazines on what to wear, social issues, trends, and more. We take those cues and we adapt them to our own personal lifestyles, as well as our budgets. Filed Under: Pro Interiors $$$ Traditional Staff Picks Posted Tue Aug 28, 2007, 5:25 PM ET — By Adrienne Maxwell
Driven by his passion for movies, this homeowner truly went the distance to create his ideal home theater. So, you think you're a hard-core home theater fan? You read the A/V magazines, you can recite the performance differences between plasma and LCD in your sleep, and you constantly upgrade your system to make sure it features the hottest new technologies. That's admirable. But, until you're willing to build an entirely new home to accommodate your home theater, you ain't got nothing on this homeowner. Filed Under: Reader Interiors Casual $$ Staff Picks Posted Tue Aug 28, 2007, 5:22 PM ET — By Tony Reimer
Although it took a total of two years and six months of hard work, an equity line is what really helped me finish my theater. Home Theater magazine, Audio Video Interiors, and the Internet were my main sources of information. The room's dimensions are 13.5 by 19 by 8.33 feet, with a closet in the rear that houses the component rack. I gutted the room to the studs, even the ceiling, and installed a dedicated power circuit for audio, video, and lighting. I ran all the wiring for low voltage in the crawl space and for high voltage in the attic. Some crossing was unavoidable, but, at 90-degree angles, I've had no problems. To begin color selection, I started with the ceiling. I simulated the night sky with Ralph Lauren flat paint in magistrate black. I took a paint chip with me to the garment district in L.A. and found curtain fabric. With those colors to work with, I picked out the wall and trim paint and the carpet to match. I already had the black leather furniture. Filed Under: Reader Interiors $ Casual Staff Picks Posted Tue Aug 28, 2007, 4:54 PM ET — By Dave Curlee
The Beginning
Filed Under: Casual $$$ Pro Interiors Staff Picks Posted Wed Aug 22, 2007, 6:01 PM ET — By Rebecca Day
A wild theater with a sonic edge shows you how to balance acoustics, design, and living space. Building a home theater is a balancing act. It could be interior design and A/V equipment going head to head, or acoustics and building materials, or the desired number of seats versus available space. It could be all of the above, but, in the end, something's got to give. In this California project, the opposing forces were optimum acoustics, along with excellent A/V, gorgeous interior design, and ample living space. The homeowner wanted to eke out as much elbow room for entertaining while giving up nothing on sound quality—all under the watchful eye of a discerning interior designer. Filed Under: $$ Reader Interiors Formal Staff Picks Posted Wed Aug 22, 2007, 5:39 PM ET — By Thomas Kern, homeowner
I've always loved going to the movies. Most of my childhood Saturday mornings were spent at the Palace Theater in Winchester, Virginia, where I could watch two films, cartoons, a newsreel, a short, and coming attractions—all for a quarter. About three years ago, I was surfing eBay and ran across a listing for a movie poster from the 1956 horror film The Mole People. I became obsessed with that poster and soon found myself in a fierce bidding war. Later, I realized what was really going on. The Mole People poster had rekindled those childhood memories, and I somehow wanted to go back in time and relive those special Saturdays. That's when I decided to design and build an ornate 1950s style home theater. Filed Under: Contemporary $$$ Pro Interiors Staff Picks Posted Wed Aug 22, 2007, 1:38 PM ET — By Adrienne Maxwell
Creative solutions for a theater's, er, shortcomings. Every high-end home theater installation presents its share of obstacles, but incorporating a theater into a family or living room, as opposed to a dedicated theater room, is often particularly challenging. Homeowners are usually more sensitive to the equipment's visibility and less willing—or able—to rearrange the room to accommodate ideal gear placement. The more unique the home design, the more challenging the install becomes, and it's up to the installer to do some creative problem solving. Ambiance Systems (www.ambiancesystems.com), based in upper New York state, has spent the last 20 years figuring out creative ways to meet the needs of their clientele. The company has received several CEDIA Lifestyle Awards recognizing their ability to subtly integrate home theater systems into challenging environments. Ambiance president Marc Leidig recently told us about one particularly memorable job in a home on the shores of Long Island Sound. Filed Under: Reader Interiors $$ Casual Staff Picks Posted Wed Aug 22, 2007, 1:36 PM ET — By Bob Yazel, Homeowner
Our home theater started out as an unfinished basement room with dimensions of 14 by 18 by 9 feet. The room is rectangular, with three doors and no windows. Audio problems are inherently more difficult to solve than video problems. Fortunately, the room dimensions are friendly to acoustic resonances. Since the theater would be right under the great room of the house, the main goal was to decouple the theater from the rest of the house as best as possible. Filed Under: $$$ Pro Interiors Formal Staff Picks Posted Wed Aug 22, 2007, 11:34 AM ET — By Mark Elson
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 Crestron's first annual Biggest, Baddest Home Award and the CEA Mark of Excellence Award, both given for this project. Filed Under: Pro Interiors Contemporary $$$ Staff Picks Posted Mon Aug 20, 2007, 6:39 PM ET — By Sunny McKinnon
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. Experts agree, as evidenced by the fact that it was recently named one of the best home theaters in the nation by the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA). "We think of the theater as a Fortress of Solitude, like in the Superman comics," says the homeowner, an investment manager who describes himself as dangerously savvy when it comes to audio/video equipment. The solitude is wonderful. I can disappear here and go somewhere else for a while." 1
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