June 2005 - page 2
Lighting and Darkness
 Lighting control is one of the most overlooked elements in the basic home theater. With your floor plan in place with furniture and gear, take another copy of your plan and note where your lights are currently located. Look for places where you would like to remove lights. If you have a floodlight right above your screen for your new DLP projector, you would be well advised to move or remove such a light. In-ceiling lights are very slick, but track lighting is a more affordable and comparably effective way to get light where you need it. Consider lighting options so that you can read a book in your favorite seat while the rest of the room is basically dark. Consider how you will be able to see and access your equipment rack of gear in a darkened room. Normally, one or two spots will do the trick without ruining the mood during a movie. Calling in a professional electrician is best in this situation. Be sure to get a dedicated circuit for your equipment rack with at least a quad outlet for plugging in gear.
The best way to make your picture look better in the room is to make the room as dark as possible. This sounds simpler than it usually is, nor is it cheap in many cases. Window treatments can cost a pretty penny, depending on the fabric you choose. I recommend ordering blackout drapes for your windows which use multiple layers of fabric to absorb light. You will want to flush-mount them in a track in your ceiling or use some sort of covering for a more traditional track. Drapes also help your acoustical situation. A more cost-effective way to deal with window treatments is to look to stores like Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware or Room & Board for pre-made drapes. Do your measurements as though you’re doing them for NASA. It is really easy to mess up. For a few hundred dollars, you can get nice thick drapes up that do a suitable job of blocking light. In order to create a dark room suitable for the best in HDTV in the middle of a summer afternoon, I am not installing windows in the dedicated theater that I am building onto my house in Los Angeles. I have planned spaces for windows in the room in the event someone later wants to tear out the theater and make it into an additional bedroom or office. Getting all of the light out of your room costs a lot more money, but your wife might consider window treatments to be a different budget than you AV gear acquisitions.
Furniture
What you park your butt on is sometimes overlooked in a theater. In my current theater, I got caught up in the idea of furniture as art. I bought some really beautiful modern sofas and chairs from a designer in Paris that cost a fortune and took seven months to arrive. No joke – seven months. While what I bought looks cool, it wasn’t a good fit for sitting for three hours watching the back nine at The Masters in HDTV. My mistake was treating furniture like art, not like fashion. In 10 years, you will want a new sofa, so it is crazy to invest in a couch that you will need to own forever in order to increase its value.
In my new theater, I am using dedicated home theater seating for six adults. While I find some of what the theater seating industry has to offer is tacky (think cup holders in your armrest), there is no denying the comfort you can get from even an affordable home theater chair. I recently sat in a $1,200 home theater chair at a La-Z-Boy showroom. I was impressed with the quality of the chair for the price. What is most important, no matter what the brand, is to get a seating configuration that allows you to suspend gravity. In other words, you need to be able to get your feet up off the ground. If you have a sofa that you like, consider adding an ottoman. Consider where your primary seating positions are and budget a little more money for those spots. Consider having some pillows made that allow guests to be able to crash on the floor for a movie. Plush carpet is also a smart move if you think people will sit on the floor. Modest theaters today more and more use another surprisingly affordable trick: creating a stage that is six inches high for the seating in the rear of the room. For a few hundred dollars in two-by-fours and plywood and a day’s worth of labor, this can be built into your theater, creating a dramatic effect and really good sightlines for your guests or kids who want to sit in the back of your theater.
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