I just bought a new house that has a basement with room for a dedicated HT. I'm pretty excited about it, but it wasn't on the must haves list. It just happened to be the house that we liked the most. The basement was certainly a bonus, but the rest of the house is still the best we had seen. My search also resulted in a great family room that could also house a decent HT so now I have two spaces.
On my must haves list was a family room that was designed around a TV and not around a fireplace. It was extremely hard to find a family room that could accommodate a 65" TV at proper viewing height and wall space for speakers. Almost all the homes we looked at had the TV above the fireplace, so you ended up looking at the ceiling to watch TV. It's the stupidest place to put a TV because who gives a crap about a fireplace when the TV will be used for 3 hours a day? I'd rather put the fireplace above the TV just to prove the point that it's a retarded feature of new homes. Yeah, can you tell it pissed me off? Why does any home in this day and age has a single fireplace? What is the usefulness of them and why would you spend a fortune putting them in? The other room that baffles me in modern homes is the living room. It's a totally wasted room with no valid reason to exist. It used to be the "living" room where the family would sit and spend time, but now it is designed as a room to accept guests who would rather be in the family room or around the kitchen munching on Doritos while watching the game. If the living room isn't attached to the entry of your home like most new home construction in my area, why not turn it into a HT because as it is it makes no sense to exist.
Depending on where you live a dedicated HT can be fairly easy to accommodate (in the midwest basements are common) so I feel like this is something that you need to figure out for yourself. How much does a HT matter to you and how hard is it to accommodate that need?
