Garden Home Cinema Room, Cheshire

A Glass-Walled Cinema Studio Near Knutsford — Artcoustic, Sony 4K and Cineak Seating

A home cinema room should not have glass walls. Glass is reflective, acoustically problematic and incompatible with the light control that good projection demands. This garden cinema studio near Knutsford, Cheshire, has glass walls on two sides — and it performs superbly. It stands as one of our more technically satisfying projects: a room that should not have worked, solved through careful design, lateral thinking and the right choice of equipment.

The Brief and the Challenge

The clients wished to view their car collection through large windows on one side of the room, while remaining visible from the swimming pool and main house on the other. The room was designed as part of a landscaping project — an architectural statement as much as a cinema — and the brief explicitly required the glass to remain. Our task was to make a home cinema room perform to a high standard within those constraints.

The Acoustic Solution

Glass walls create two problems for cinema rooms: they reflect sound waves back into the space, creating a muddled audio environment, and they make conventional speaker placement impossible. We addressed both simultaneously. When the cinema is in use, floor-to-ceiling curtains made from multiple layers of specialist acoustic fabric close across both glass walls, converting a glass-walled studio into an acoustically manageable space. The fabric is installed in a “Tempo Wave” configuration — gathered to increase the depth of material and maximise its sound-absorbing effect. The result is a room that behaves acoustically like a well-designed cinema when it needs to, and opens entirely to the garden and car collection when it does not.

Artcoustic Speaker Installation

With glass walls and acoustic curtains covering the side wall positions, conventional surround speaker placement was not possible. Artcoustic P6-12 array speakers were the solution — installed in acoustic fabric-wrapped bulkheads positioned above the curtain line, angled down toward the listening positions. This keeps the speakers above the curtain track, allowing the curtains to operate freely, while the angled array ensures the sound reaches every seat at the correct level and angle. The front stage sits behind the acoustically transparent screen with full left, centre and right channels plus subwoofers, and the ceiling carries additional speakers for Dolby Atmos height channels. Anthem AVR room correction calibrates the entire system within the specific acoustic environment the closed curtains create.

Projection and Screen

A Sony VPL-VW760ES 4K laser projector delivers the image onto a 3.8m acoustically transparent projector screen. Eight Cineak home cinema seats — among the finest residential cinema seating available — are arranged in two rows, each with the sightlines and comfort to sustain a long viewing session. A rear bar area completes the room, making it as well suited to entertaining as to private use.

The Result

A cinema room that does everything a cinema room should not be able to do given its architecture. The glass walls remain, the car collection is visible, the swimming pool view is preserved — and when a film starts, the acoustic curtains close, the Artcoustic system engages, and the room performs at a level that reflects the quality of thinking that went into solving it. The clients described it as the best-sounding room they had experienced. We think the constraint helped.