Home Theater Design
Ideas and Advice

Good home theater design can be elaborate of fairly simple. But you will need to get several things right so that your home theater or media room will perform the way you want it to perform. A home theater can be the perfect addition to a home. It will add value to your home and is often a feature buyers are looking for and can help a house sell faster.

The first thing to decide is how you plan to use your home theater or media room design. That decision will influence many aspects of the design. Will it be used exclusively for watching movies? If that’s the case, do you want to capture the feel of a commercial movie theater, but on a more intimate scale? A commercial theater is a special place, isolated from the rest of the world, where you expect to be transported to the magical world of the silver screen. The “movie-only” home theater might be placed a distance from the main living spaces in your home to help reinforce the sense of isolation and to also control sound. It might have a décor that is reminiscent of a vintage theater from long ago. A home theater design like this would have a different set of design criteria than one that is intended to be used both for viewing movies and regular television.

Once you have decided on the type of home theater you want, you need to plan the room size, shape, and location within the house. Whether you are designing your house from scratch or if you are choosing the perfect room to convert into a home theater, it is usually best to avoid rooms with a lots of natural light. lots of outside light can be difficult to control and will interfere with the visual quality of your movies. This means no skylights and minimal windows. The best place often is in the basement.

But if you plan to use the room to watch sports or other television, you may want your home theater to be more of a media room and maybe it should have some windows. In that case, consider installing blackout curtains to keep out the sun for daytime movie screenings while still giving you the option to open the windows and watch the snow fall while the football game is on. A fringe benefit of black out curtains is that they will improve the acoustics in the room, too.

After you settle on the room dimensions and location within the house, you can dig into the “nuts and bolts” of the design and start making decisions and choices about Home Theater Design Plans, Home Theater Seating Layout, the home theater screen, a projection television, or big screen LED or plasma television, acoustics, lighting, audio systems, automation, and interior design and finishes. For a quick reference, check out our Home Theater Tips. If you get all of this right, you’ll be sure your home theater design or media room design makes the most of the space available and creates a genuine theater experience.