Like so many others on the forums, wei've come to the point in time where we are building our media room from scratch. We've purchased a new home and will be putting together a room about 11x18.
The floor plan (area D will be the media room, area A a spare bedroom, area B the games area and area C is going to be a wine cellar..see
this link):
Now there are many things i've considered about designing this room, many pictures sifted through, many forums read, many websites perused, but ultimately we still do not have a whole ton of ideas as to what to do with this.
The room will be well insulated, but not sound proofed. The floor joists will also be insulated prior to adding a ceiling.
The ceiling for this room will be drywalled, not drop design and i have already thought ahead about having an outlet placed in the ceiling for a future front projection unit. I will also add an 'open' outlet for component video or hdmi connections leaving a pull string to run it later if necessary.
Wires will be run in-wall for a 7 speaker setup so in the least i need to figure out speaker locations ahead of time so no test listening to find best location unfortunately.
There will probably be wainscotting and baseboards, but no other real fancy features. We have to decide if we are going to add any 'architectural' interests to the walls or ceiling, but probably nothing too big. If we so decide to sell the house in the future we cannot have a room that ppl would walk into saying, "Oh my god that is so 2000s". We are keeping it simple and formal traditional (woods, stones, metals, earth tones, no flowery prints, etc.).
We have decided to put less wide, French doors as the entrance to the room, fixing them up with weather proofing materials (e.g. door sweeps, weather stripping) to keep them from rattling and help with sound insulation. We will also be putting some heavy curtains across the back wall in front of the doors to help with light dampening and sound dampening.
There should be a location to the right hand side near the front to build a cubby insert in the wall, about 6 feet wide and maybe 5 feet tall as a location for the electronics rather than having them in a stand against the otherwise flat wall. This removes them from the line of sound entirely while breaking up the room shape as well. It is likely that we will have some bookshelf units in this room to hold dvds.
The room will have a thick plush carpet and at present will also house our 2 oversize loungers (chair and a half style, 6' long). We will be placing beanbag chairs at the foot of the loungers for extra ppl when necessary and a console will fit between the loungers. There is not much room left for other furniture so further sound tweak will have to come from things like wall panels or curtains.
Any further ideas, tips or suggestions from those who have already gone down the pre-construction path would be helpful.
Links to simple ideas and traditional look media rooms would also be of great use.
The construction should begin this September, so we have 2 months to work out a plan. We are presently interviewing designers and building teams. Pictures of the completed rooms will be posted after it is done.
Of course, the sound system for this room is comprised of our Axiom speaker set.
