With a tap of a button from your seat, you can lower your shades and turn a sunny room into the perfect environment for getting lost in film. However, if your home theater does have windows, we recommend keeping natural light out with room-darkening motorized shades. Sunlight is the ultimate wet blanket on any great movie-watching experience. Ideally, home theaters shouldn’t have any windows. Your walls should also be painted with a flat or matte finish rather than gloss or eggshell to avoid light reflection. While paint color is ultimately a personal decision, our home theater designers suggest dark grays, dark browns, dark blues, and even black if that’s your thing. The darker they are, the less light will reflect off them. To make the picture on your projector screen really pop, it’s best to keep your walls and ceilings dark. You can even adjust the stars’ colors and intensity to your liking! Choose Dark Paint Colors for Walls Create the look of a starry night sky overhead with fiber optic twinkling and shooting stars.

Star ceilings are another consideration to make your home theater stand out. Accent lighting transforms a home theater from bland to grand and lets your personality shine! From tunable LED strips in coves to decorative wall sconces or column lighting, accent lights can come in many forms. This effect not only serves as more safety lighting, but it can add a nice touch to your room aesthetics and make guests say “wow!” Add a Wow Factor with Accent LightingĬreate more opportunities to wow your guests with unique accent lighting. Some home theater seats also feature colorful LED lighting at the base of the chairs to illuminate the floor around them.

You could illuminate steps with small, decorative lights that direct low lighting downward onto each step or place LED strip lights under the lip of your risers. If your home theater has tiered seating or steps, make sure any raised flooring is clearly visible in the dark to avoid injury. Also, consider separating your lights into zones so you can control the brightness of overhead lights, wall sconces, and safety lighting separately. You’ll find that brighter lights might be better when watching sports with friends and dimmer lights are better when enjoying a film. We suggest making all lighting dimmable so you can customize your lights to fit your activity. Dimmed overhead lighting above seats or low accent lighting on walls can provide the right amount of light to help you feel comfortable without impacting picture quality. You might be thinking, “Shouldn’t all the lights be off?” While you do want a dark room, a pitch-black room can strain your eyes and make it hard to move around. Lighting control is critical to creating the perfect movie-watching environment. SEE ALSO: 4 Clever Design Ideas to Improve Your Media Room Experience If you’re building or revamping a theater room in your Chicagoland home, follow these key lighting tips from the home theater designers at Avidia! When lighting is an afterthought, it can destroy an otherwise awesome movie-watching experience. In this blog, we’re focusing on home theater lighting. A well-designed theater room features many unsung heroes that help make it great: acoustic treatments, custom theater seating, strategic lighting, integrated room control, and more. To create an epic home theater, you must think beyond the display and speakers. Check Out These Expert Tips from Our Home Theater Designers

Media room lighting