Kent Home Cinema
The leading Home Cinema designer in Kent, our design process is carefully planned with specific stages to understand your needs and deliver the most enjoyable room for your budget.
Your new favourite room, a luxurious home cinema will transport you to another world, fully immersed in the action and adventure. At Cinema Lusso we specialise in complete turn-key rooms, simply provide us an empty room and we will create your dream cinema.
We believe that the experience in your beautiful Home Cinema begins the moment you enter the room. Our design process is split into 2 separate parts, the Technical Design and the Interior Design.
During our first meeting, we will ask some questions in order to understand how you will use the room. This will include questions about what you will watch and who will be with you. Our clients often use their rooms for Movies, Sporting events, TV Series, Gaming & Music. A room designed 100% for gaming would be very different to a room used 100% for movies, so it’s important to understand the things you like to watch early in the process.
A room designed 100% for gaming would be very different to a room used 100% for movies, so it’s important to understand the things you like to watch early in the process.
FAQs
What areas do you cover?
From our bases in Surrey and Buckinghamshire, we build Cinemas across most of the UK, but the majority of our projects are in the South East, including Kent, Essex, Surrey, Sussex & Hampshire.
How much does a Home Cinema cost?
The term “Home Cinema” covers a broad range of systems, from low cost Cinema in a Box systems or a Soundbar to a True Cinema Experience. Our typical rooms can better be described as a Cinema at Home, because they are share much more in common with a Commercial Cinema or Professional Screening Room than a set of speakers and big TV.
Much like a bespoke Kitchen, the cost of a Cinema room will depend on the size, design and performance objectives. We often think, a kitchen is a suitable comparison. Allocating a similar budget for a complete Home Cinema Room as a new Kitchen, is a simple starting point.
A budget of £20,000 will allow us to produce a high quality surround sound audio system with a big, bright and colourful image from a 4K projector.
As budgets increase, we add interior design, seating, lighting and acoustic treatments, until an equal budget is allocated to the Room and the Audio/Visual system.
With an equal split on the equipment and the room, £40,000 is a would be a sensible budget for a small complete turn-key room, just hand us an empty room and we’ll turn it into a beautiful finished cinema.
A larger budget helps to create higher performance, or allows us to furnish larger rooms with more seating.
How much space do I need for a Home Cinema?
The room can really be as large or as small as suits you and your family. Large and Small rooms both have their own unique challenges, requiring carful design consideration to provide the best experience in the space you have.
A 30 – 70m2 floor space is optimal in most situations, 6 x 5m – 10 x 7m would be perfect for most situations, providing a range of seating options, though we have created some stunning rooms in both smaller and larger spaces. With some careful planning we have created a full cinema experience in rooms as small as a single garage or bedroom conversion.
What can I do if my room isn’t perfect for a Cinema?
We can help you achieve your dream room in even the most unusual of spaces. A loft conversion with pitched ceilings or even a non-standard shape, will require creative design to accommodate the essential equipment and seating. These rooms can still become incredible cinemas, but it’s important to understand any compromises involved early, to make sure the design accounts for them without impacting the performance.
We work with a large range of specialist suppliers, making sure we can always design and specify the best possible system for the space that you have available.
What is a Reference Cinema?
There are many technical standards established to create a public commercial cinema that meets the Audio and Video performance requirements of Dolby or THX.
.These standards do not directly translate to the often smaller rooms we have at home, but they can represent a good starting point for the performance required to make sure you enjoy the artistic expression the film makers intended.
Separate standards and best practice have been created for the home. Our Technical Director, Ben Goff, is part of the joint international committee run together by the Consumer Technology Association & CEDIA. This small committee are responsible for publishing RP22, the Surround Sound Audio Best Practice and recommendations for Home Cinema
Combined RP22, its video equivalent RP23 and the HVAC paper CEB24, provide the framework to create a Cinema in your home, which equals or betters any commercial cinema you may have visited. Achieving this level includes meeting targets for criteria such as:
- Sound Pressure Level of each speaker and subwoofer
- Positions of every speaker relative to each seat
- Difference in Sound Level from the best seating the room, to each other seat
- The length of time that sound echos in the room, calculated to hundredths of a second
- Screen Size and viewing angles
- Image brightness and colour accuracy
- The comfort of the room, including temperature and Humidity control
Though others may describe a Home Cinema as having Reference performance, just because it meets the required Sound Pressure level. We only class a room as being a Reference design, when it has been engineered to meet every criteria set.
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CINEMA LUSSO: Home Cinema Room Design & Installation | Surrey | Sussex | Bucks | Kent | London | Essex
Interior Design
During this meeting, we will also use our Oculus VR Headsets to show you some sample room designs. This helps us to understand the type of room you would like in terms of style, colours, fabrics, layouts etc.
Once the room design is completed, we will meet again to show you the finished design again in VR, so that you can see exactly what we will be building for you.
Technical Design
We work to tried and tested Engineering principles for each room. Instead of focusing on a specific speaker or amplifier brand, we focus on the end result, and the exact specification required for your room.
We can provide a range of demos at our own showrooms in Surrey and Buckinghamshire, as well as Manufacturer demo Facilities across the UK. This allows us to highlight the different levels of performance that are possible in different room styles. It is unlikely that any of the demo systems will be a perfect match for your needs, or your home, instead they are a reference point, to understand the elements that are most important to you and the performance level that is suitable for the design.
Seating Layout
The technical design must always starts with the seating design – to put it bluntly, any designer that doesn’t start with the seating layout is doing it wrong.
We need to understand Who will be using the room and how many people. Rows of individual recliners might be suitable for inviting guests over for a blockbuster, but totally impractical for watching a family movie with young children, where a large sofa might be more suitable to sit together. If you want to accommodate more guests than the room will naturally seat, we have options such as a bar area with bar stools, this can be a really popular spot to watch sports.
Screen Size and Type
Once we know Who and What, we can design the most suitable seating layout, from there we can calculate the most suitable Screen size based on how far away the seats will be.
The screen size will may point us towards either a TV or Projection system, but content will effect this as well. For watching Movies we would almost always recommend Projection, for Gaming and Sport a TV might be more suitable.
If we’re using a projector alone, without a TV in the room, the required brightness will depend on the things you watch and how much light is in the room. For a movie, you would typically lower the lights, but that might not be suitable with a group of friends watching sport on a summer afternoon, or a family movie with young children.
Speaker Positioning
Speaker positioning follows on from Screen selection. If we are using a projection screen the main speakers will almost always be placed directly behind the screen, as they are in a commercial cinema. For a TV, speakers will be placed around the screen, as close to the recommended angles as possible.
The number of Surround speakers and their positions are calculated based on angles from the seating position. Typically a bigger room will benefit from an increased number of speakers in order to reduce the distance between them.
The trade off to more speakers, is that the available budget needs to be split between more speakers, amplifiers, cables and installation time, if budget is limited, it can be better to split into fewer speakers. The balance between Quantity and Quality here is one of the more important decisions.
