Family Media Room – South of Derby

The client’s brief was based around the transformation of his children’s playroom into a more family-orientated television and games room.

The client wanted a large wall mounted television, with surround sound capabilities for watching films and playing games. However, due to the shape of the room and additional changes being made to it, along with access from two parts of the house along the wall the television was to be mounted, speaker selection was highly restricted. To combat this a 5.1 in-ceiling configuration was selected, which would not only create a clean aesthetic for the room, but also remove any obstructions from the walk way through the room.

Although the client had asked for Blu-Ray playback, along with integration of his children’s existing games consoles, the client also owned a large quantity of movies on DVD, and wanted the children to have easy access to them. During the course of our design meetings the option of storing these discs on a network attached hard drive was discussed, so the children could select them from an on-screen graphical user interface by the DVD’s artwork, to make choosing the correct title as easy as possible. In order to simplify this process even more, and include selection of the any of the available sources from a single handset, a Control4 system was installed.

The Control4 home controller, in conjunction with a dedicated media player for the DVD’s, meant that this was all coordinated from the one interface, speeding up selection of options in the room and providing a clean, easy to use control system the whole family can use. Even the lighting circuits in the room are connected to the Control4 system, so preset scenes can be created and selected, as well as standard dimming control of the connected lights.