Crown Jewel
Winner 2015 CEDIA Awards:
Best Home Cinema Under $150,000
Cinema Overview
The cozy cinema blends warm, earthy tones, integrating existing home materials like cedar and veneer. Wavetrain Cinemas remotely designed the project, incorporating exterior materials for a cohesive aesthetic. A custom 100mm thick sliding door ensures both sound isolation and seamless operation. Ingenious engineering transforms timber slates into effective acoustic elements. The front row offers bean bags for a relaxed viewing experience. Despite not meeting the clients, the award-winning cinema is a hit.
Project Details
Warm and earthy tones make this space the pinnacle of comfort. Making sure to create a connection between the existing home and the cinema space, materials that were used in the rest of the home were incorporated into this design. Specifically, the rough sawn cedar ceiling was brought in to contrast the timber veneer used on the walls. In doing this, the textural differences create balance, allowing the material palette to become a perfect balance between smooth and rough.
Wavetrain Cinemas was engaged to design this project without ever meeting the client. On a trip to NZ, we had a great meeting with the architects. We wanted to be sympathetic to the whole house design and so decided to bring materials used on the outside of the home into the cinemas. Rough sawn cedar from the outside is contrasted with veneer to create interesting textural details and a subtle palette that blends perfectly in the rest of the home design.
The cinema has a massive sliding door that opens up half the wall down one side. This created an obvious sound isolation issue, but also meant that there was a large section of the wall which was acoustically untreated in a critical portion of the room. We therefore designed a one-off custom cinema door that is 100mm thick and is mounted on special sliders and dropped into channels in the floor and door frames, with brush seals. The door was so heavy it needed to be lifted in with a crane and took 10 people to move. That weight is almost imperceptible when sliding the door and glides and closes almost silent against the seals.
Most people would think lining a room with timber is bad for acoustics, but we engineered the timber slates to act as a bass absorber and then perforated the timber where we needed more mid-range absorption. The fabric hides all the speakers, diffusers, etc and the curtain has been lined with a special absorber to pick up first reflections.
The front row of the cinema was left free for bean bags, as the cinema was too small to accommodate 2 rows of reclining seats.
We are still yet to meet the clients, but hear they love their award winning cinema.
Project Features
- Triad Speaker System
- Cary Audio
- Sim2 Nero 3D Projector
- Xeit CM5-E Anamorphic Lens
- SMX 140” wide 2.4:1 ProMask Masking Screen
- D-Box Motion System
