A homeowner, who built a private screening room for his family to enjoy, has fallen in love with it himself.

Walk into this gigantic 2,600-square-foot home theater and try to envision the kind of person who would build a private screening room of this magnitude. It’s probably owned by a man, right? It’s extremely masculine in style with polished wall-to-wall woodworking, two bold rows of sturdy-yet-handsome leather recliners, and a red velvet theater curtain with gold tassel fringe.

The no-nonsense design is confident. Bold. Refined. Sophisticated. This is a serious space for serious entertaining. Or is it?

Introduced in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, and popularized by Walt Disney in 1954, the Nautilus is still the most famous of all submarines. Kirk Douglas and James Mason starred in the movie, but the novel’s menacingly sharklike vessel, with its opulent Victorian interior, was the real star, and ignited the dreams and imagination of many a youngster.

A new addition designed for lap swimming morphs into this nautically-inspired home theater.
 
The “six degrees of separation” phenomenon is happening among Home Entertainment’s readers and home-theater aficionados. Some owners of the private screening rooms that have graced the magazine’s pages actually know one another.

A case in point is the couple who built this contemporary movie space, nestled within a woodsy family compound in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.

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Masterpiece Theater

Tons of hidden gear combine with an obstacle course-like construction zone to create our favorite theater of the year.

Every time the owners step foot into their golden home theater, they feel as if they’ve traveled back in time to their Italian honeymoon.

Consider this: A regular everyday person—not a big-name, highly-in-demand interior designer—masterminded every single detail of this elegant private screening room outside of Los Angeles.

While the wife doesn’t have any formal interior design training, she bravely orchestrated all of her home’s interiors from top to bottom.

Theater design luminary Jeff Smith collaborates with a style-savvy client in creating a glamorous home theater for a South Florida vacation home.

“Build a theater around this,” the wife said to First Impressions Theme Theaters’ founder and theater designer Jeff Smith, as she handed him a sample of animal-print carpeting.

“There was something about it that spoke to me,” she says. “I felt the tiger print motif would impart a sense of drama and elegance.”

Building a home theater out of thin air requires both adaptation and flexibility.

When a hip, young Los Angeles real estate developer/entrepreneur decided to add a home theater to his Los Angeles-area home, he knew exactly what he wanted—right down to the color scheme and seating configuration.

How to incorporate the theater into his existing home, however, was another question.

In this award-winning home, what’s new is meant to look old. Translation: This house was designed to resemble a finely restored Georgian home. And that means every ounce of technology is hidden and out of the way.