Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The Challenges of Media Rooms

The other day I was at a clients home to look at a space which has acoustic issues but this time is was a living room. Since we usually advise on theaters and conference rooms I had to think out side of the box a bit. The clients live in a home in Miami which is large, stark and very contemporary. As I went through the process of defining what they were looking for and what they would be open to doing to get to a satisfactory point I was told that they would not consider window treatments of any sort and that the middle sized area rug might be replaced but the new one would only be about 1 foot larger in each direction.

The room is a challenge. It is 22' tall by 20' deep by 21.5' wide with a tile floor, has an area rug with a large glass coffee table, large windows over 2 walls of sliding glass doors. The ceiling is flat and the couch which is the only furniture aside from the coffee table is leather. An additional acoustical concern is that the front of the room is open to a kitchen and hall way. There is no carpeting in this home.

The clients complained that when they have even a small number of friends over, the noise gets out of hand very quickly and watching TV is no pleasure. I showed as many images of projects as I had with me and they liked the looks of a room that we did with a chair rail and simple clean light colored panels above the chair rail and a darker version in the lower ones. They also liked a conference room design that had 18" x 18" panels spaces apart in different colors. This room is going to have a 5.1 surround system and the client don't want to see the speakers which will require in wall mounting, however we are dealing with exterior walls. The surround speakers can not be placed in the ceiling as that is 22' high and will sound bad.

In a room with this type of layout, I would normally try to get as much material into the space a I can but the other wrench that the client threw my way was a budget of $10K to $15K. They asked if covering one wall or the ceiling would be the best bet and I advised having absorptive materials on more than one surface to get the best bang for the buck. I currently have 2 proposals put together for them. One is a coverage on all wall surfaces in the living room up to the lower edge of the upper windows including a chair rail and the other is for the conference room look. The conference room look will just barely make the budget but the other, nicer looking in my opinion,
will actually do more to solve the acoustical problems and more than doubles the budget.

I am betting that the more advanced proposal will be one accepted. If so, the room will finally sound pretty good and get more use.