Theater Squeezes into 8' Wide Room
By Steven Castle
This home theater still manages to pack in a 92-inch screen, high-performance projector and surround-sound system.

How’s this for a mini-theater? It’s 16 feet deep, but only 8 feet wide, and opens to a billiards area in the back. That makes for cozy confines, as in two rows with just two seats each and one aisle between them. That was okay for these homeowners, though, who wanted to use some space they felt was wasted.

“This space was actually a walkway leading to two bedrooms, one of which was converted to a gym,” says Joe Polovich, senior systems design engineer with theater installation firm Boca Theater & Automation (BTA) of Boca Raton, Fla. “They really wanted a theater, but didn’t have a room they could dedicate. They adjusted a few walls to make it wide enough to be adequate, and decided to use it to their advantage.”



The challenge for BTA was finding the right equipment and making it perform well in the narrow space. The homeowner also wanted a high-performance system. To that end, a Runco 1080p DLP projector was mounted on the ceiling in the back of the area. The unit shines on a 92-inch Vutec HD fixed screen that just fits in the narrow space.

For speakers, BTA chose James Loudspeaker in-walls for the front. “With such a narrow space, in-walls were the only way to go,” says Polovich. James is BTA’s top-of-the-line model. Two more James in-ceiling speakers are located over the rear row of seats, and an in-wall 10-inch James subwoofer fires from below the center channel.

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