Small Home Cinema Room, London
A High End Immersive Cinematic Experience
This Home Cinema Room Design is for a room measuring just 4.5m x 4.5m – quite a small footprint for a room which needs to deliver a cinematic experience to beat a commercial cinema. Luckily rooms with smaller volumes can develop higher sound pressure levels – the subwoofers in particular have to work less to really create a punch!
The Initial Room Design
The Client was determined to get the best cinematic experience possible in this room with seating for 3 or 4 with provision for occasional extras. With this in mind me we sourced a wrap around sofa in a velvet material which allows seating for 8 people or 5 in absolute comfort. We added a bean bag too which helps with acoustics and doubles as an occasional seat when required. The scalloped ceiling was carried over from the original unused playroom and we painted the everything in Farrow and Ball colours to emphasise the architectural features. The matt paint finish reduces unwelcome reflections, allowing the viewer to focus on the huge projector screen.
Nine Seats. No Compromise.
Seating nine people in a smaller London cinema room requires precise sightline calculation from the very first design sketch. With multiple rows in a compact footprint, the difference between a satisfying cinema experience and a neck-craning one is determined entirely by the relationship between screen height, row spacing, seat height and platform elevation — none of which can be improvised on site.
This London installation demonstrates what precise design achieves. Every seat has an unobstructed view of the full screen. The Artcoustic speaker array delivers consistent volume and imaging across all nine positions — an outcome that requires careful speaker placement and level calibration rather than simply positioning speakers symmetrically. The Crestron control system manages lighting and AV from a single interface, with scenes programmed for entering the room, watching a film and cleaning — the kind of everyday usability detail that distinguishes a professionally delivered system from a self-installed one.
For London clients considering a cinema room where space is at a premium, this project is one of our most relevant reference points. The lesson it teaches is consistent: a smaller room designed with precision outperforms a larger room designed carelessly.
Project Details
- Location: London
- Seating capacity: 9
- Audio: Artcoustic surround system
- Control: Crestron
Our Home Cinema & Home Theater Services
Read more about our Home Cinema and Home Theater work:
Design
Calibration
Treatments
Seating
Theatres
Cinema Ideas
The Audio Video Package
Our go to speaker manufacturer is Artcoustic Speakers and they really excel in a room like this. The front channels and subwoofers are all hidden behind the huge 3.3m projector screen and the rear and surround speakers are wall mounted. At only 67mm deep and colour matched to the walls they really blend in whilst delivering a stunning audio experience. Artcoustic in-ceiling speakers handle all the height channel audio for formats like Dolby Atmos.
A Sony 4k Laser projector easily illuminates the 3.3m Screen Excellence projector screen with a super crisp image.
Lighting Design & Control
The lighting design is fairly simple in this room – evenly spaced downlighters are integrated with the scalloped ceiling and provide soft pools of light down the walls and a narrow beam spotlight illuminates the center table. The room is split in to a number of lighting channels all controlled by a Crestron lighting system with the actual programming handled by Crestron Home OS3 – allowing the client to change lighting scenes via an iPad and then recall the scenes via the lighting keypad by the door.
The Cinema Construction
This room was a fairly simple construction from our point of view with the majority of our work being on the interior design side rather than building fabric walls etc. We were handed over a very good shell in the form of an unused playroom so the only actual construction was a stud wall to house the front speakers and projector screen – fortunately this also blocked up the only window in the room allowing us to precisely manage the lighting levels with the above lighting control system.
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