These impressive custom home theaters will inspire you, fill you with envy

By Caleb Denison and Brad Bourque March 29, 2015

Need a little inspiration for that home theater project you’ve been thinking about? This should do the trick. From the simple and understated, to the fanciest themed rooms, these home theaters all bring something special to the table. If you want to build the perfect homage to your favorite sci-fi series, or your favorite superhero flick, or something totally original, it won’t be easy, or cheap. But when you dim the lights for the first time and fire up the system, it will be worth all the effort.

There are a lot of different options for designing your home theater, and not all of them just involve couches in a rectangular room. Some people have laid theirs out as game rooms, with pool tables and golf simulators. Others have opted for even less traditional designs, with full bar setups or poker tables around a set of TVs. If you watch mostly sports, you can set up several smaller screens around a pool table, or place them in a row over a full bar for an unforgettable experience that will ensure your friends always watch the game at your place.

There’s a lot of careful planning that goes into building the perfect home theater for your house, from deciding on a layout and theme, to choosing the right audio and video gear. These pictures should help you develop an aesthetic, and some design ideas, as well as helping you make that crucial decision between a television and a projector screen. But once you’re done with all that, you’ll have a room all your own to impress friends, kick back with family, or just catch up on your streaming. Work hard enough, and you might just find your house on our list.

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If you’ll indulge us for a moment, picture this: A warm summer evening spent in the backyard with your loved ones, enjoying a classic movie thanks to a carefully cultivated outdoor home theater. To us, that’s not just the perfect way to spend a summer night, it’s a much-needed escape from the turmoil of everyday life in the year 2020.

Done right, that’s exactly what an outdoor movie theater provides. The ideal setup can match the immersion of the traditional home theater while incorporating the natural environment of your own backyard which, for many of us, is the closest thing we’re getting to an outdoor retreat for the time being.

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THX has become synonymous with top-notch cinema sound in commercial theaters. However, the George Lucas-founded company (now owned by gaming giant Razer) has been increasingly focused on helping consumers get a better quality of audio (and video) at home. To this end, it has created a new technical service called Tuned by THX, which gives audio companies the opportunity to have their products custom-tuned by the sound experts at THX. While it doesn't guarantee that the speakers and audio components will knock your socks off, it's THX's way of saying that it has adjusted the characteristics of these components to deliver what is (in THX's opinion) the best sound that these components are capable of.

In automotive terms, it's like taking your car to a Formula 1 mechanic for a tune-up. They won't be able to magically turn your Fiesta into a Ferrari, but they'll still be able to coax more performance out of it than it had when it left the factory. With a Tuned by THX audio component, the difference can be very noticeable.