Home theater rooms - some more pictures with commentaries

This is my favorite home theater design in this entire set of pictures. All the components are surrounded by a traditional painting style frame. It works very well functionally, because you can easily connect all the components of the home theater system, hiding the cords behind the frame. You also get plenty of storage for your DVDs. A soft rug on the hard wood floor helps to keep the sound from bouncing around the room.


I like everything here in terms of media room decor except the floor and the walls. The floor is too shiny and prone to distorting the sound. Exposed brick is cold and uninviting. But the entire media room looks uncluttered. The stands for the back speakers are substantial and solid.



One obvious problem is the lack of central seating. Really bad for surround sound. And I hope the wood paneling does not rattle.



Notice that the projector is retractable. This must have cost a bundle to install. The location of the side and back speakers is VERY wrong. They should not be on the ceiling, for goodness sake!



I like the lighting here, as long as it is on dimmers. It is essential to control the intensity of light, because even different movies can make you want to change how to room looks and feels. This home theater really needs a large rug in the middle.


The seating is all wrong. Only a couple of seats are actually facing the screen. Using a footstool for the central speaker makes everything look cheap.



Not bad, but must we have those chandeliers hanging over our heads??

See also:
Home media room pictures

Home media room: storage idea

In my opinion, the very concept of a home media room (home theater room) derived from the time-hallowed tradition of having a whole room in the house dedicated to books, that is having a home library. Such a room necessarily demanded some space assigned where you can enjoy the books: with desks, armchairs and other kinds of comfortable seating solutions. Now, remember that books are properly considered to be media, just as movies and music (which you should know if you ever used media rate to send books or CDs by USPS). It is natural then to also have special storage in your media room to house your collections of CDs and DVDs. There is a small complication, however.

Firstly, DVD and CD covers are usually quite colorful, much more so than book covers. This creates unwanted distraction even when the light in the media room is turned off. Also, because DVDs and CDs generally do not differ much in terms of their size this results in rather monotonous looking shelves of boxes, a problem hardly alleviated by the presense of boxed sets.

Secondly, a decent home theater requires good accustics. Numerous plastic boxes are not likely to achieve this.

What's the solution? It seems as if you really want to have enclosed shelving. If possible, these storage units should also have additional padding, to prevent the sound from getting trapped the room, causing dinny sounds and undesited reverb.