I have been spending the past two years trying to figure out how we designers can come up with a recipe for creating home theaters that puts us on more solid ground than the ground we are on when a client gives us an empty room and tells us, “Go ahead and design a theater.” The traditional solution has been to ponder the situation, produce some ideas, then implement them in a very custom way. In other words, we always start all over from scratch.

My life at the moment is consumed with the challenge of figuring out how to engineer all the various elements of a home theater. For years, I have seen how difficult it is to create each new theater design from scratch and to work my way through the process without a consistent structure, guided only by a vague application of aesthetics.