5 Lighting Best Practices to Consider for Your Home Theater

Check Out These Expert Tips from Our Home Theater Designers

To create an epic home theater, you must think beyond the display and speakers. 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.

In this blog, we’re focusing on home theater lighting. When lighting is an afterthought, it can destroy an otherwise awesome movie-watching 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!

SEE ALSO: 4 Clever Design Ideas to Improve Your Media Room Experience

Make All Lighting Dimmable

Lighting control is critical to creating the perfect movie-watching environment. 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. 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.

We suggest making all lighting dimmable so you can customize your lights to fit your activity. You’ll find that brighter lights might be better when watching sports with friends and dimmer lights are better when enjoying a film. Also, consider separating your lights into zones so you can control the brightness of overhead lights, wall sconces, and safety lighting separately.

Place Safety Lighting Along Steps

If your home theater has tiered seating or steps, make sure any raised flooring is clearly visible in the dark to avoid injury. 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.

Some home theater seats also feature colorful LED lighting at the base of the chairs to illuminate the floor around them. 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 Lighting

Create more opportunities to wow your guests with unique accent lighting. 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.

Star ceilings are another consideration to make your home theater stand out. Create the look of a starry night sky overhead with fiber optic twinkling and shooting stars. You can even adjust the stars’ colors and intensity to your liking!

Choose Dark Paint Colors for Walls

To make the picture on your projector screen really pop, it’s best to keep your walls and ceilings dark. The darker they are, the less light will reflect off them. 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. Your walls should also be painted with a flat or matte finish rather than gloss or eggshell to avoid light reflection.

Keep Natural Light Out

Ideally, home theaters shouldn’t have any windows. Sunlight is the ultimate wet blanket on any great movie-watching experience. However, if your home theater does have windows, we recommend keeping natural light out with room-darkening motorized shades. 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.

We hope you enjoyed these quick lighting tips from the home theater designers at Avidia. For more tips and tricks on the latest in smart home technology and entertainment, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and follow us on social!

If you’re interested in learning how we can help with your home theater project, contact us here or message us in the chat box below to schedule a free consultation. We look forward to hearing from you.