One of the challenges of living in the North East U.S. is having to curb our activities
to the four seasons of the year. So when my wife and I decided we would like
to have an outdoor living area and I secretly saw the opportunity to also
build my long desired home theater in one fell-swoop, the question became how
could I fuse the two concepts into one grand design that would make both the
Mrs. and I happy. For the outdoor concept the no-brainer approach is what
everyone else does which is to build a sizable deck perhaps with some sort of
canopy for remedial precipitation protection. Of course the big issue is for
all but a few months of the year the entire development is literally put on
ice. This just wasn’t acceptable to us. Surly there must be an approach that
would allow us to experience the outdoors while being indoors year round. I
got inspiration from one of the many magnificent skyscrapers in Manhattan
where I work that utilize advanced glass technologies that has become
increasingly affordable over the past few decades. Buildings like the Bank of
America building on 6th Ave. This building is one that makes notable if not
ostentatious use of glass in its design. It has a street level year round
public gathering area complete with vegetation and furniture etc. Eureka!
That’s what we need. All be it, on a much smaller scale. Now I knew what I was
after… an advanced glass structure. After much research I settled on a Long
Island based provider of just such structures. The project is now essentially
complete although I still have one pet idea left to implement, all of the
critical elements are in place and functional.

The room is a little under 300 sqft and has 360 degrees of glass, counting the
ceiling. It is on a raised platform so the porcelain tiled floor melds
perfectly with the house floor which makes it another room of the house. But
what a room. The emergent experience of the room is amazing. I call it “The
decompression chamber” because even if you don’t turn on any of the
electronics the room takes you to another place entirely. Most people are just
accustomed to sitting in a darkened box to watch a movie and it may seem
detracting to do so in broad daylight but it so isn’t. You see this is all
about the choices. If you want to watch a particular movie in the dark just
watch it at night literally under the stars. Watching Sting in concert in
Berlin sing Bourbon Street under the actual pale moon light is a blast you
have to experience to appreciate.

Our outdoor theater is amazing all year round. We actually budgeted for a HVAC
climate control installation but luckily we waited for one full year to see
what it was like during the coldest harshest days and it turned out we didn’t
need the HVAC after all. On the coldest winter nights with 3 feet of snow on
the ground and the winds bending the trees we sit and watch Adele in concert
at the Royal Albert hall with at most a couple of radiant heaters from Costco
turned on. Of course this is with the wood burning stove in the dining room
going full tilt. On the hottest summer days the room is completely perimetered
by 5ft tall screened windows when opened they bring the outside inside, minus
the bugs. This works better than I could have ever expected because as you can
see from the pictures we are surrounded by 60 foot tall trees which permits
only reasonable amount of direct sun to reach us when the leaves are in full
bloom in the summer months. The leaves fall in the colder months allowing far
more direct sunlight through the 300 sqft glass ceiling and walls. No doubt a
clear sunny day is wonderful but if you love weather like I do just wait until
it rains or better yet the natural light special of a thunder storm at
night, Oh my. We have high intensity LED Spotlights mounted on the back of the
house above the ceiling of the theater that when turned on illuminates not
only the back yard but inside the theater through the glass ceiling giving a
warm oblique light /shadow effect to all the plants and fixtures in the room
at night. It is a fantastic effect and is preferred to turning on the in room
mounted lighting. As a matter of fact we rarely ever turn on the inside
lighting a salt lamp my wife picked up gives off an amazing orange glow that
has come to define the ambiance of the room at night for us. For privacy the
inside is completely perimetered by insulated curtains that can be drawn as
can be seen in the photos. My remaining pet project for our outdoor theater is
to cover the one non-glass wall, which used to be the outside of the house, in
simulated stone paneling.

The TV set in the theater room is a Sony Bravia KDL-55EX710 LED with an
ambient Back-light kit and is one of two displays connected to a host HTPC
which resides in the other living room at the front of the house. The second
display is a Sony 60” Grand WEGA which is also in that living room. The HTPC
that runs everything runs on an AMD Phenom II 6 core processor at 3.8 GHz
each. With a Geforce 465 GPU. You see once you go 1080p you just can’t go back and this kind of power
is required to watch Avatar or black-eye peas on MKV file with no stuttering.
The HTPC system has an external media bank of 4 terabytes of hot swappable
ESATA drives connected via ‘Superspeed’ USB 3.0. Sound is awesome from the Sony
AVR STR-DH820, Klipsch QUINTET SL surround speakers with a 12” Cerwin Vega
subwoffer, also Sony Blu-Ray Player, Sony 400 Disc DVD Changer etc. We use RF
keyboards to control windows 7 and the SAGETV interface which controls the
cable recordings and TV viewing via a Hauppauge 1212 HD-PVR.

Take advantage of a small yard and make it beautiful. Space can help direct interest.. :)

Few people are doing this because of the difficulty of the design. But your theater is awesome!

The theater room that you have is very attractive and the designs is very cool then relaxing way to acquire with the environment given.

your theater is awesome.

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I totally agree with that the design of the theater room here is awesome and the theater room looks quite beautiful. It is a fact that the appropriate design of theater room can provide you with the unique experience of the movie.