Mayflower London

HOME CINEMA -The Importance of Lighting for the Viewing Experience

Mayflower London look at lighting combinations that enhance the Home Cinema experience, whether you’re an action film fanatic, a sports fan, or a viewer that favours calming documentaries.

Lighting settings for home cinema can vary enormously, and their effectiveness can be very much dependent on the content being viewed as well as the personal preferences of the viewer and his family. Today in this blog post we look at lighting combinations involving products from lighting specialists that can make the Home Cinema experience one to cherish for all the family, whether you’re a die hard action film fanatic, a sports fan, or the sort of viewer that favours a calming and insightful Attenborough wildlife documentary.

Lighting options for perfect viewing

At the flick of a switch or the push of a button, your average everyday sitting room can be transformed into a cinematic viewing theatre that rivals or even surpasses your local cinema. Sometimes this will mean having to use curtains or shades to blackout rooms that have windows. However, a home cinema room that is pitch black will strain your eyesight, so adding a backlight such as those specifically designed by our team Screen Research or Screen Innovations can rectify this whilst offering improved contrast and colour differentiation. Lighting should always be dim enough to be able to fully focus on a motion picture whilst just being bright enough to allow you to move through the room without tripping over your box of popcorn or giant slurpee. 

Very often home cinema rooms are equipped with several layers of indirect lighting. This usually involves LED downlights and cove lighting or, in larger home cinemas, star ceiling lights and stair lights. These combinations of different layers of lighting can be adjusted to suit the content that is being watched. Lighting can be adjusted so as to soften the environment, allowing the space to maintain more of a household, family feel, or it can be coloured in such a way so as to create a higher level of intensity for watching a suspenseful thriller or chilling horror movie. Having layers of lighting that offer the option of being used individually or in combination can be especially useful if your home cinema room doubles up as a sitting room or a reception room, so it is often a feature worth investing in.

The right lighting settings can assist in catalysing a perfectly engaging home cinema experience and can play a huge role in mentally transporting viewers away from their home. Combining the appropriate levels of brightness and colour as initiated by SMART automation controls immediately creates a scenario that will swiftly propel viewers to forget their surroundings and fully immerse themselves in the action on display.

Mayflower London’s tips for planning a home cinema

For those with the budget and the right sort of space to do so, Mayflower London would recommend incorporating home cinema lighting features into the actual structure and architecture of the room. Whether this takes the form of continuous LED column lighting to add some dynamism to the room, star ceiling lights for a nostalgic drive-thru feel, a shadow free contour light or even a combination of several of them, this will often allow for lighting settings that offer both the best conditions for viewing and a tasteful, ultra modern aesthetic.

For home cinema lighting, Mayflower London would recommend installing products such as Lutron homeworks or Crestron’s new 4-Series processors and making use of the expertise of lighting designers such as John Cullen.

At Mayflower London, we offer an end-to-end service, priding ourselves in the design, supply, installation and maintenance of the latest in automated home cinema rooms and setups. As well as automation professionals, our expert team includes acclaimed architects, talented lighting designers as well as fully certified electricians, all of whom add substantial value to the creation of bespoke home cinema for our clients, ensuring everything is properly connected and functioning at its full potential.

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