Essential Aesthetic Elements For Any Home Theater
So you’ve decided to build a home theater. Congratulations! Now what? Selecting a video and audio system and installing these items are all essential components of your new home theater system. But you’re not done there.
Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to really have some fun. There are a few things you might want to include in your home theater that you may not have thought of. While many of these might seem like aesthetic changes, they are also essential elements for your home theater.
Ceiling
Home theater ceilings often get ignored, but can add a lot to the value of your home theater. One of the biggest crowd pleasing additions to any home theater is a star ceiling. These LED or Fiber Optic lights can really set the mood for watching movies, listening to music, or just hanging out in your awesome home theater room. If you want to take your home theater to the next level, you should invest into a quality home theater ceiling.
If you’ve already built your home theater, it’s not too late. You can still add in a star ceiling to your home theater, but there are fewer products to choose from. If you haven’t built your home theater yet, or you want to put in an entirely new ceiling, now is a great time to get a star ceiling for your home theater.
Lighting
There are a lot of options to consider when figuring out the lighting in your dream home theater. In addition to installing an awesome star ceiling, you can install dimmable lights and indirect lighting.
It’s important that you have the ability to completely control the lighting in your home theater. Dimmable lights are a great place to start. There’s nothing like turning all the lights off in your own personal theater right as a movie begins. Once the movie is over, you won’t want the lights back up to full power immediately. Instead, slowly increase their brightness until your eyes are more accustomed to the light. Your lights can be programmed slowly return to full brightness, or you can control it manually.
Indirect lighting is something that a lot of people forget to include in their home theater. What happens if someone needs to get up in the middle of the movie? Indirect lighting goes on the bottoms of chairs, in aisles, or on stairs. While indirect lighting isn’t very bright, having a little extra lighting can help keep you and your guests safe during the movie, while keeping the lighting in your theater to a minimum and pointed away from the screen.
Another great source of indirect lighting is cove lighting. These lights are built into recesses in the walls or under ledges. They direct light up to the ceiling or down to the floor. This keeps the light away from your movie screen. When cove lighting is done well, it even hides the light fixtures.
Argenta also knows how to help bring all these lighting options to you in color effect lighting. Color effect lighting changes the color of the light based on a pre-programmed mode or on a manual setting. These colors can be set to set the mood for a movie, match your favorite sports team while you watch the game, or anything else you want. It’s just one more subtle thing you can do to take your home theater to the next level.
Paint
Selecting the right paint color is a big deal for your home theater. Some people want the walls and ceiling of their home theaters to pop with color, and be visually appealing when the lights are on. While it’s great to have a bright colored home theater, that can negatively affect the quality of your movie.
When you turn the lights out in your home theater, you want the walls to disappear. Bright colored walls stand out and will reflect the light from your theater screen. Instead of picking a fun, bright color, it’s better to paint your walls with a neutral color. Darker shades of grays and blues make great movie theater wall colors.
In addition to picking the best color for your walls, make sure you pick the right finish for the paint. Glossy finishes will create highly reflective surfaces that the light from your screen will bounce off of. Using a matte finish is ideal, but an eggshell finish is also good at diffusing the light from your screen.
Seating
If you’re building a home theater, you understand the importance of having comfortable seating. A lot of luxury seating in popular movie theaters are high backed seats with a reclining headpiece. These are great for comfort but also create a big problem. Having a high backed seat makes it harder for your awesome surround sound system to do its job as the headrest can physically block the sound from reaching your ears. When choosing seating for your home theater, consider using low back seats to allow you to have an immersive surround sound experience.
Finally
Even though many of these elements appear to be aesthetic, they each serve a functional purpose to help take your home theater ceiling, lighting, sound, paint, and seating to a new level. Watching movies or TV shows in your home theater should be a great experience for everyone. We want to help you get there. If you have questions about how Argenta can help you build or renovate your current home theater, contact us. We look forward to helping you on your next home theater project!
