Case studies

Luxurious Home Theatre with Hidden Depths (6/8/2007)

As an installer, what better way to impress potential clients than to show them a practical example of what you can do, and what they could have? Headquartered just outside of Antwerp, Belgium, home theatre installation company Mitra recently built a new state-of-the art demo room to complement its two existing demo suites. Indeed the term 'demo room' perhaps does not do justice to this luxurious theatre.

The brief

Mitra's design brief, drawn up by owner and managing director Rik Hellemans, was to build one of the best home theatre demo rooms in Europe, not only in terms of sound and vision, but also interior design. As a result, the attention to detail has been meticulous.

Kim and Rik Hellemans.

The vision Rik and his son Kim had was for a showcase not only for all the home theatre equipment, but also for luxury interior design and finishes. For a streamlined effect, all the technical and service side of the system was required to be hidden from view.

The room has a Middle Eastern feel, with the front row seating comprising enormous crushed velvet cushions, large enough to lie back on. The rows behind have individually-controlled reclining leather seating. Tasselled lanterns hang from the ceiling, and carved wooden soffits and walls finished in crushed velvet add to the exotic effect.

Looking back at the seating, with crushed velvet cushions in the front row, and individually-controlled reclining leather seats for the next two rows.

The automation system is designed to control the whole room. The control processors are in an equipment room, and they talk to each other via IP or RS232, so everything is seamless. A Crestron system controls the air conditioning, all AV equipment, curtains, and theatre chairs, while a Vantage system controls the lighting. According to Kim Hellemans, "Vantage was chosen and integrated all over the building because of its keypads and programming style, and Crestron was chosen for its overall reliability, and because it has a great user interface and the touchpanels are lovely. The effect we wanted was to have complete, yet simple control from a Crestron wireless touchpanel. For example, after a movie you can reset the theatre so all of the chairs line up and the lighting goes up, and there could be, for instance, an owner's preset to set his or her individual chair settings, lighting etc."

Planning and implementation

The room was a completely new shell, but the layout of the space was fixed. One of the design considerations was to hide the entrance door, and to install air-conditioning within the limitation of the less-than-ideal ceiling height. They overcame this problem by building a lower ceiling over the existing ceiling but leaving a 50mm gap around the perimeter. The air-conditioning ducting was then installed in the space behind the lower ceiling and blows out cooled air around the perimeter gap.

One of the advantages of this approach was that there was the space behind the lower ceiling to have a large air intake, which means the air-conditioning system is almost silent. The system extracts at floor level, and in keeping with the design philosophy, the vents are hidden.

The entrance door was hidden by creating a small vestibule with a simple curtain, and placing motion sensors at the entrance so the door and curtain open and close automatically.

Automated curtain in front of screen, and entrance at side.

The screen used was a top-of-the-range acoustically-transparent Screen Research Cinecurve, chosen because of its ability to easily handle all formats including Cinemascope.

The task of providing the audio was left to Genelec, and although the speakers are not on show, but hidden behind the screen and fabrics, they are a key part of the installation. As Kim Hellemans, explained, "Genelec was ideal for this installation for a number of reasons: the reliability of Genelec monitoring is well-known, and their monitoring systems are designed to be extremely flexible so the speakers can be adjusted to suit the room acoustics. This means everybody listening in the home theatre room can enjoy excellent sound. The large range of Genelec monitors also meant that we could find a system that was perfectly tailored to meet our needs."

Acoustically transparent screen with Genelec speakers behind.

Work started on the demo room in February and the total build time was around two months. Carpentry was sub-contracted and the rest of the installation was done by Mitra's specialist team.

Conclusion

The client feedback to this state-of-the-art theatre has been very positive. Everyone who has experienced a demo, has been very impressed with all aspects of the room. In fact, Mitra's investment of nearly €400,000 has been more than justified judging by the number of home theatre projects it now has on the go and in the pipeline.

Equipment list:

Video
Runco VX-44d, 1080p 3-chip DLP projector.
Screen Research Cinecurve Cinemascope 4m wide curved (2.35 aspect ratio) with masking, acoustically transparent.

Audio
Classe SSP-600 Balanced Surround processor.
Genelec 3x HT324A Fronts, 4x AOW312 Surround, 1x HTS6 Subwoofer.

Sources
Classe CDT-300 DVD.
Toshiba HD-EX1 HD DVD.
Kaleidescape Player-1 network player video server.

Automation
Crestron Pro2 Processor, TPMC-8X Wifi Touchpanel.
Vantage Q-link Lighting system.

Seating
Cineak Fortuny Deluxe and Intimo

Treatments
Cineak Acoustical panels.

www.mitra.be