Your room with a view
Jay and Maria Rappaport didn't just watch The Matrix at home, they immersed themselves in it. An 11-foot screen fills the front wall of their home theater in Great Falls, Va., and a nine-speaker system explodes with surround-sound realism. The cinema experience doesn't stop there. Wood pillars, fabric-covered walls, and cone-shaped sconces all conjure up a contemporary movie hall. Ten leather chairs rise in three levels, stadium-style. Jay Rappaport plays the role of projectionist, controlling the action with a sophisticated hand-held touch-screen remote control. It will switch on the projector TV, tune it to the DVD player, adjust the volume just right, and even dim the lights. "All by pushing just one button," he says. "It's heaven."
Tens of millions of American homes now have at least the basics for a home theater--or media room, as the industry calls it. Oversize boxes of speaker kits and big-screen TV s are wheeled from store warehouses into neighborhoods every day, where the proud owners will try to make sense of myriad cables and connections to set up their own media room. But for a few well-heeled homeowners, these electronic goodies are just the starting point for an in-house cinema. Some of them sign up for whole-hog designs that can turn a rec room into a miniature Art Deco movie palace, complete with marquees, concession stands, ticket booths, and a proscenium arch over the screen. To further the effect, velvet curtains pull back automatically as the movie begins, and the corn starts popping as the lights dim. "Everybody eventually orders a theater popcorn maker," says Al Hutchinson, whose HTmarket.com sells theater accessories for the home (box, Page D4).
Big-screen boom. Movie stars and moguls were among the first to own screening rooms back in the 1920s and 1930s: The 50-seat theater was the largest room in William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon, Calif. When big-screen TV s emerged in the mid-1980s, a few wealthy folks began building special rooms to house them. Twenty years later, it no longer seems a fad--with custom installations growing at about 20 percent a year, to around 55,000 in 2003, according to market analysts at Parks Associates.
The average price? In the range of $35,000 to $45,000, just for the electronics. Construction and a fancy decor can easily double that cost or push it still higher. Building a dedicated theater often involves new walls, floors, and ceilings--essentially floating a room within the original room, with space between the walls for cables and soundproofing. "Some installers brag they won't even touch a job that's under six figures," says Greg Pass of SuperVision, which installs home theaters in Los Angeles. Seven-figure installations are not unheard of: The Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association includes a $1 million-and-up category in its annual best-of contest. "It's not that everything is gold-plated, it's that the real estate is bigger," says Theo Kalomirakis, a designer of theaters for the likes of movie critic Roger Ebert, author Dean Koontz, and movie star Eddie Murphy.
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