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In a customer-driven business like home theater installation, unpredictability and change are expected, and how the integrators respond to that change is the measure of their skill and professionalism. So when a client asked his integrators, Gramophone Ltd. of Timonium, Md., to shift gears on his new project, they not only rolled with it—they came up with a world-class project that not only exceeded all expectations, but literally made the client’s dreams come true!
Referred by a friend, the client came to Gramophone with a simple request. “He wanted to use his existing 60-inch rear-projection TV and five Bose speakers and subwoofer,” recalls Gramophone Sales Manager Jeff Hudkins. “He wanted to make a theater out of this. He and his best friend are Baltimore Ravens season ticket holders. Part of the reason he wanted to do this was so he’d have a really cool space to watch football.”
When Gramophone came on board, a plan was already in place. “His builder had sketched the room and (planned to) put in a bunch of seating to watch this TV that would be hung on the wall,” Hudkins says. “He brought that to us and we took a look at it and said, ‘If that’s what you want to do, that’s where we’ll start. His first real step forward was saying, ‘I’d like to do something acoustically to isolate this room from the rest of the house.’ We wrapped the room in acoustic treatment paneling to keep the sound in the room and keep it from reflecting.”
The project evolved from there. “He has a staircase that comes up the back of the wall of his theater,” says Gramophone Interior Designer Bethany Johnson. “Originally he planned to have that all open so you could look over the back wall into the stairwell, and he was going to hang a curtain in this space. One of the first suggestions we made to him was that he needed to close that up into a full wall.”
Once practical matters such as these were resolved, Gramophone started to get creative. “We were meeting with him,” Hudkins recalls, “and I said, ‘You really need to see something cool.’ We’d just put into our showroom a Runco 100-inch video wall. It was ideal (for his theater) because at that point in time (the space) had windows in it, and this is a device that lets you watch a great big screen without having to dim the lights.”
Gramophone’s innovative ideas didn’t stop there.“Probably the most powerful thing we talked about was CDGI, which is a company that does fabrication of theaters,” Hudkins continues. “We can create a theme for a theater and they’ll build it in Florida and ship it to us in pieces. We can assemble it and build it on site. The theme that we created for this was like a ‘Star Wars’ set. He went for that. His wife is a big sci-fi fan as well.”
“That became a driving thing,” Johnson says. “The sconces we picked looked like light sabers. When we fixed the Cinescape panels to the wall, lighting specialist Jeff Nale pulled out these new-to-the-market LED color-changing recessed lights. We showed those to (the client) and he said, ‘I want ‘em.’”
But the best was yet to come. “We built the Tardis (the time machine from “Dr. Who” that resembles a British pay phone booth) as the entrance to the room,” Hudkins says, “so when you come up the stairway, you make a turn and when you enter the Tardis, our lighting designer added a motion detector, so as soon as somebody comes into it, these lights go on and give you a strobe effect, and the audio track of the Dr. Who theme plays for about six seconds.”
Other innovations included: in-wall speakers that were originally going to be painted black, but were left in their original white since they gave a “Star Trek”-like glow when the LEDs hit them; and a starfield ceiling that, according to Hudkins, “gives the effect when you start to dim the lights that you’re actually watching a movie up in outer space.”
Amazingly, this massively ambitious project was completed in six months at a surprisingly reasonable (for this level theater) cost of about $200,000. Hudkins and Johnson credit their team members, including lighting designer Jeff Nale, acoustic specialist Matt Lyons, computer programmer Dan Sanzone and project manager Kurt Hackenberg, as well as builder Sam Pleeter, for all of their efforts on the project.
As you’d imagine, the client’s delighted with the end result. “I’ve never, ever had a customer as happy with the finished result of a project as I’ve had with this customer,” Hudkins says. “He is overjoyed.”
“… As are all three of his children,” Johnson adds. EG
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