In the 20 years this home took to design and build, the architecture and technology become more modern.

In 1987, the owner purchased 42 acres to grow citrus in an agricultural community north of Los Angeles. Postmodern architecture was all the rage, so the owner hired Zoltan E. Pali to design a Georgianstyle residence.

The young architect, a disciple of the Case Study modernists, was just starting out on his own.

In the 20 years between the original drawings and full completion, both men, and the home, evolved in a variety of ways.

A Kentucky client modifies First Impressions Theme Theatre Inc.’s showroom theater for his own private screening room.

A single man building a three-story riverside home in Bowling Green, Ky., decided it would be fun to be able to entertain his friends in a custom-built home theater whenever the Tennessee Titans and Western Kentucky basketball and football games are on television.

The next step in creating this dream space involved stumbling across a magazine story about First Impressions Themed Theatres Inc. and its custom-designed home theaters.

"Too much of a good thing is wonderful." Those famed words, uttered by none other than the silver screen siren Mae West, is a sentiment shared by Dan Kelleher, the owner of this Montana home theater. In fact, "Too much of a good thing" is a description the former Silicon Valley Bank chairman uses a lot when discussing his 69-acre compound in Flathead Valley, which is 15 minutes outside of Big Fork, and just around the corner from Whitefish Mountain Resort and Glacier National Park.

For their home theater, Timothy and Kelly Phelan wanted the look of a 1920s picture palace, complete with heavy red velvet theater curtains and a lot of antique gold. And like the rest of their 17,000-square-foot Colorado Springs home, they wanted their private screening room to be comfortable for them and their five children, whose ages range from 3 to 22.

Affectionately called "the bunker," this multipurpose basement space, owned by a former hedge fund executive, is the scene for serious music listening and film watching. The downstairs space also doubles as a recording studio.

The winding cobblestone driveway and abundance of rosebushes at the entrance is charming, albeit somewhat ordinary. But when the perfectly aged, 12-foot-tall arched wooden garage doors open to reveal a floor that is fashioned after the one in Venice's 16th-century Salone Maggiore, you realize that nothing is as it appears at Villa Rosa Rugosa, Danny and Shelley Brose's 18,000-square-foot Italian Renaissance fantasy villa in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.

Owning an ornate home theater designed in the style of a 1920s movie palace—with knockout modern technology—is enough for some people, but not for the owner of a $15-million, 26,000-square-foot Florida estate. This retired business executive envisioned adding a mini Caribbean village to his entertainment zone—one filled with shops and eateries to "wow" his friends and family.

Architect Mark Weber of Wheeler Kearns Architects in Chicago calls it “de-densification”—the combining of spaces to create more room for fewer families. “In the early 1900s, architects such as Marshall & Fox built grand apartments that, over the ensuing decades, were made into numerous apartments. Now we are seeing a reversal—a going back to the sense of grand-scale apartment living.”