LoveSnow

There are all kinds of home theater rooms with as many different styles as there are people, but I'm not sure I like the term "home theater" for the room that we're going to create, because "theater" is not the primary reason for the room. I love music, doesn't matter what kind, as long as it's good music. 🙂 But more importantly, one thing that makes all the music better is a good sound system. With that in mind, the room will be designed around the best "sound" that I'm willing to pay, and trust me, you can spend a LOT more than I am. The video/"theater" portion of the room is secondary for me but it shouldn't disappoint even the best movie enthusiast. 
This will not be what most people picture as a home theater room. I've been in some rooms that had great sound and video, big home theater chairs, the whole thing, but the rooms had no personality, no life. You felt like you were in a padded room and we knew that wasn't what we were looking for. 
  
... A room that looks more like an old "lounge" than a modern home theater room. Our goal is to have a warm, inviting place to go to watch a movie, listen to music, watch TV, have a drink with people, or just read a book. 
To understand what we're dealing with, I have some pictures below of the current room. Everything you see in the room was put there until we could turn it into a media room. The room is more like an open space as, it is open on the right side of the room, and on the opposite side you have three large picture windows. The struggle is real. Obviously it's not ideal for sound but it is what it is. I had thought about enclosing it some but the wife nixed that idea pretty quickly, and I don't disagree with that, and I'll show the reason in a minute. 
What you see in this image will be the front of the room. The TV helps to put the size in better perspective as it is 85". Everything within the yellow outline is going to be removed and replaced with dark wood cabinets and shelves. The ceiling and back wall sheet rock will be removed, so pretty much the entire room except for the existing hardwood floors will be gutted, and even those will be covered by carpet. 

 
This is looking toward the open part of the room. You can start to see why we don't wan to close it in. When you come down the stairs, the room opens up to the three picture windows. Plus when you're at the bar, if the media room was closed in you couldn't see anything. 

 
These are pictures taken before we bought the house, but you can get an idea of the view out of the windows and why we don't want to block that.


 
I've collected a lot of images of rooms that resembled what our thoughts were for our room. None are exact matches by any stretch of the imagination, but different bits and pieces will be used to come up with our own design. 
In these images, the dark wood cabinetry is more what I'm thinking instead of that awful looking off white that is in the room now. The TV will be built in as I doubt anyone would ever splurge to try to put in one larger than 85". To go larger you're looking at $60k for a 98" Sony. I don't think so... But I am considering adding a projector with a screen I can drop down out of the ceiling in front of the TV when we want to watch a movie, and I'm considering that option. 



 
Once we get rolling on the plan I'll have more to share about the actual room design as there will be LOTS of small steps along the way.