Home Cinema Room Design

For the passionate film enthusiast, the traditional West End cinema experience is surely the ultimate form of presentation that the medium can be appreciated through, yet even now, these venues are gradually becoming a thing of the past.

With smaller, less ornate auditoriums within the modern multiplex venues across the country that are merely functional, yet bland and uninspiring; offering no presentation to a film showing to speak of without decorative interiors, creative ambient lighting, curtains, or any other ornamentation as found in the picture palaces of the past, – the sense of escapement to somewhere special has been lost forever, save for a handful of tastefully restored original cinemas running as independents.

For a number of years through the technical press in ‘home’ audio-visual journals, there has been an expansion in the design of home cinemas for clients wanting to recreate their own private theatre for film presentation, yet many practices commissioned with the execution of design, build and installation have failed to engage with a complete level of authenticity with their designs through a simple lack of understanding cinema theatre architecture.

This extends to the implementation of projecting onto incorrect screen ratio’s for the presentation of Cinemascope or Panavision films; a practice that not only afflicts nearly all home cinema installations, but virtually every multiplex auditoria today, despite the film industry strongly supporting this superior mode of film presentation on large budget productions. To experience a film shown in the full width Cinemascope screen ratio is in itself, an impressive aspect.

As former member of an architectural society, making study of cinema theatre architecture, a head start over the competition enables the right design cues to be considered for the discerning client wishing to realise their own ‘boutique’ cinema within a given room in their home, no matter how compact or large the space. Such projects can be in the realm of, ‘the sky’s the limit’, but less expensive design work can equally be undertaken with simpler, less extravagant cues. The only limit is with the imagination.