A real theater, in a family home.

The owners had seen enough theaters to know what usually goes wrong: rooms that impress for a demo and exhaust an audience by the second act, seats that hear different movies, equipment that needs its owner present to work. The brief back to us was short. Make it right for every seat, make it effortless for every guest, and make the room worth the space it takes.

That brief decided the process. The seating plan came first, and everything else, screen size, speaker positions, acoustic treatment, riser heights, was engineered backward from where people would actually sit.

The screen is sized to the seating distance, with the front three channels behind it at screen level. Surrounds sit at ear height beside the rows, and the risers were set so the back row sees the full picture over the row in front. Absorption lands at the first reflection points and disappears into the finishes, and the isolation was detailed while the walls were open, in both directions.

Behind the wall, the library lives on Kaleidescape and the video runs through madVR processing, racked, labeled and burn-in tested in our shop before install. The theater runs on the same control system as the rest of the house, so one press dims the room, settles it to black, and wakes the screen last, because light before image is the order your eyes want.

Handover was a film with the family in their own seats, not a walkthrough of menus. The system was calibrated seat by seat, the one-press scenes were walked at night, and the documentation pack, drawings, rack elevations, calibration results, transferred with the room.

The measure we build to is a houseguest starting a film without asking how. This room passes it.