Gerhards Residence — Private Cinema

Some rooms are built to impress. This one was built to put you inside the movie — to live in the experience rather than simply watch it — and to make you forget you are in a room at all. From the very first concept, the Gerhards theater was designed first for performance and second for style and beauty, because true suspension of disbelief begins with what you see and hear, not merely what you admire. The result is a space where the picture is beautiful enough to feel, and the sound is clean, immersive, and effortless enough to disappear around you. 

At the center of it all was Argenta Solutions, which brought the entire team together and led the project from concept through performance. This is the home of Andrew and Louise Gerhards, and the brief was theirs from the start: a theater that places you inside the movie rather than simply watching one — the suspension of disbelief you feel in the experience itself. Above all, it was to be a place for their young family to gather, enjoy, and share quality time together for years to come. Guided by that vision, Argenta authored the complete system — engineering the equipment design and hand-selecting and coordinating the finest partnered manufacturers — while the room itself was shaped by Lisa Slayman Cinema. What began as a theater for a home to be built in Park City, Utah, ultimately found its place in the family’s Virginia residence — and over a five-year journey from first concept to final calibration, that vision was carried through and realized detail by detail, until the technology vanished and only the experience remained. 

Lisa Slayman of Lisa Slayman Cinema shaped the room itself — its style, its acoustics, and its lighting — giving the space its classic, subtly Disney-inspired character, its extraordinary attention to detail, and a palpable sense of comfort and luxury the moment you step inside. LBI Boyd executed the construction — the carpentry, millwork, and every finish in the theater — turning the design into flawless physical craft. 

A project of this scale lives or dies on coordination. The greatest challenge was keeping every detail and every document clear across all of the teams, so the classic Disney concept could come together without a single compromise to the design — because any compromise there would ultimately be felt in the final experience. It was a labor of love for all of us, and a genuine pleasure to work alongside our sister company, Fusion AV, who took on the whole-home portion of the project so the theater lives seamlessly within the larger residence. 

At the heart of the experience is a reference-grade cinema. Video begins with a Barco Residential Heimdall+ Cinemascope projector — a compact solid-state RGB laser delivering 6,000 lumens of pure, wide-gamut color at a near-silent 29 dB, with full HDMI 2.1 support. It is paired with a madVR Envy Extreme MK2, the reference video processor prized for frame-by-frame dynamic HDR tone mapping, AI-based 8K upscaling, and MotionAI frame interpolation with automatic aspect-ratio and screen-masking control.

Together they image onto a 217-inch, 2.37:1 acoustically transparent Seymour scope screen with breathtaking contrast, depth, and dimensionality. 

Sound is built around a 14.4.4 immersive layout — fourteen listener-level channels, four subwoofers, and four overhead channels — decoded by a StormAudio ISP Elite 24 processor with full Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, and Auro-3D support. Concealed behind and around the room, a complete Wisdom Audio planar-magnetic system — anchored by 76- inch Sage Cinema Line source speakers across the front and driven by dedicated Wisdom DSP amplification — delivers sound that is powerful yet weightless, enveloping the audience without ever calling attention to itself. Beneath it all, four Wisdom STS subwoofers — each equivalent to dual 18-inch drivers — deliver earth-moving low frequencies you feel as much as hear: deep, effortless, and utterly physical. 

To protect that experience, the entire theater is engineered as a fully decoupled, room within-a-room structure, isolated from the rest of the home with Kinetics Noise Control engineering — so no sound from the house ever intrudes and none of the cinema’s power ever escapes, sealing the audience inside the illusion. Every element was then tuned and calibrated by Argenta, both audio and video, to draw maximum performance from the room, while purpose-built acoustic treatment, silenced projector cooling, Control4 automation, and Josh.ai voice control complete a system engineered to be felt, never seen. 

The result is more than a home theater. It is a piece of storytelling in its own right — performance first, beauty always — proof of what becomes possible when a homeowner’s vision, a unified team, and relentless engineering are given room to dream. Five years in the making, it was a true pleasure and a genuine thrill to create — a project the entire team is proud to count among its finest. Because that is the difference a room and system built to this level can make: you no longer simply watch the movie — you are inside it.