Case Study - A basement that probably shouldn't have been finished.

This space started life as a storage area you didn't notice, except for the giant bank safe door sitting in the middle of the floor. Shortly after we started the audio/video and lighting control on the rest of the home the client asked us if we thought the space would make a good home theater. You'll have to use your imagination to picture the room as we didn't take before pictures. This was an area of the house that was not intended to be finished. It had pipes hanging from the fairly low ceiling, electrical and other wires running in and under the floor joists, an electrical subpanel and what seemed to be concrete everywhere you looked. This room proves you can make almost anything into a really nice space.

We were fortunate enough to work with an outstanding Architect, Larry Whittaker or YOW Architects. He and I started bouncing ideas around about layout and what the functional requirements of the room would be. The clients only requests were that it incorporate the safe door, and that it was neat. We started by measuring the immovable areas of the room and creating a CAD base file. Here's what that looked like on this home;

In this project virtually none of the black lines could be altered. Many of them are concrete, the others were load bearing.

Next we start working in seating, screen location, ingress/egress and see what happens. The blue lines on this drawing are an early sketch of one idea.

 

We liked the concept enough to explore some additional details;

Upon further review and comment from Larry the rear of the room got spiced up;

This design created a trophy room and a rear access closet for our equipment. It also eliminated the rear surround channel(s) which was deemed a worthy loss given the aesthetic improvement. Realize that aesthetics and performance are often at odds with each other. For some clients performance is paramount, for many others making performance compromises for aesthetic gain are an acceptable trade. Losing the rear surround speakers was deemed acceptable because the side channels were well placed (they are where the traditional THX 5.1 channel design required).

This design also added a motorized drape in the front. The drape that is shown in the rear of this design was eventually scrapped for the super cool Butch and Sundance painting. The front of the room was a very tight fit and the screen and drape barely fit. It was so close that the screen had to be installed before the wood so that we could gain 1 1/2" by laying the wood over the screen frame. This is the final floorplan;

Once the final floor plan was approved elevations were created;

These elevations and the floorplan were printed in large scale on a D size plotter and the construction is carefully coordinated with the contractors.

Execution is where the rubber meets the road. Fortunately with a great construction team there were very few problems. The final result is a theater that won two national home theater awards and was featured in several magazines. You can read the articles by clicking here and here.