Narrow focus

The good news: These North Carolina homeowners wanted to use their spacious basement for a dedicated home theater to seat eight. The bad news: A load-bearing wall in the middle of the basement reduced the usable space to about 12 feet wide. It was 40 feet long, but as custom electronics contractor Scott Varn of Harmony Interiors in Asheville, North Carolina, says: "I told them they might want to consider putting in a bowling alley instead." To fit eight seats in two rows, the first thing Harmony Interiors did was eliminate the armrests between the chairs. Then Varn and company had to tackle the projector problem. A DLP projector was to hang from the ceiling, but the ceiling was less than 8 feet high, and the homeowners wanted the second row of seats to be raised above the first. That precluded placing the projector above the second row. Varn wanted to hang it above the front-row seats, but then the projector would be too close to the screen, actually casting a larger image than the screen they had selected for the space. It was a difficult problem, until Harmony and the homeowners decided to move the front row back and enlarge the screen. See this slide show

 To see more Hot Houses such as these, subscribe to