It’s hard to imagine Bill Jones being content with an out-of-the-box home theater—or a media room with a couple of couches parked in front of a big-screen TV. After all, he’s not living the college bachelor-pad lifestyle. He’s an electronics mogul whose 14,000-square-foot Florida home is his castle: a shrine to Art Deco design filled with dozens of works created by the noted masters of early 20th-century style.

But it was only after Bill and his wife, Jan, met Theo Kalomirakis—a New York–based designer regarded by many as the father of the home theater—that they learned how state-of-the-art audiovisual technology could be combined ingeniously with period decor. “I saw a magazine blurb about Theo and, out of the blue, I dialed his number,” Bill recalls. “He flew down, looked at the house and said, ‘We could do this—we could do that.’ When I learned what was possible, I said, ‘Let’s go for it.’”

A ticket office and the neon glow of a marquee bring the visual excitement of a night on the town to a quiet evening at home. (Click image to enlarge)

Now whenever the Joneses and their three children want to see a movie, they skip going the econoboxes at the neighborhood multiplex. Instead, they stroll upstairs to the Savoy Thea-ter, a custom re-creation of a 1930s movie house, complete with a dazzling mar- quee, a lobby and ticket of-fice, an elegant foyer and a posh auditorium. “This,” Bill says, “is the ultimate fantasy.”

The Joneses own Metra Electronics Corp., a company that manufactures car-stereo installation accessories. After relocating the business from New York to Daytona Beach, Fla., in the 1980s, they settled in nearby Ormond Beach. The neo-Gothic brick exterior of their home resembles Wayne Manor in Batman, Jones says, but the 17 rooms inside are all about Art Deco. Sharp-angled sofas designed by Paul Frankl and a semicircular breakfront by Gilbert Rohde lend an air of luxury to the living room. Fifty enameled vases designed by Camille Faure lend a touch of elegance to the dining room. A personal mahogany bar designed by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann raises the glamour quotient of the master bedroom.

Beneath the foyer’s coffered ceiling, letters in a Helvetica font spell out the final destination. “The Savoy” is etched onto the padded auditorium door’s cast-bronze push plates. (Click image to enlarge)

When it came to carving out a comfortable, stylish place for the family to watch television and movies, and play video games, the Joneses set aside 1,000 square feet on the second floor.  The couple then asked Kalomirakis to dream up something reminiscent of the Big Apple’s Radio City Music Hall, one of their favorite Art Deco palaces. In turn, Kalomirakis —who has conceived dozens and dozens of home theaters, in styles from ancient Egyptian to contemporary and seemingly everything in between—set out to produce the desired look in painstaking detail. “The challenge,” he says, “was to turn a big empty barn into a subdivided space with a sense of approach and destination.”

Inspired by the Main Street movie theaters across prewar America, as well as by the Wiltern and Pantages theaters in Los Angeles, Kalomirakis began by laying out a glitzy marquee. The Savoy—the name of a London hotel that Bill always thought had a nice ring to it—glows in blue and red neon, while a can-opy of incandescent bulbs shines above a ticket office made of a handsome burl wood. A touch of whimsy lies within the ticket booth. “It’s a mannequin of a little old lady wearing rhinestone glasses and holding a cigarette in one hand,” Bill says. “We call her Mabel.”
Rounding out the lobby is a bronze starburst logo embedded in the black granite floor and a “Now Play- ing” display case for such movie posters as the one for the 1937 musical “Sunday Night at the Trocadero,” which Kalomirakis presented as a parting gift to the family upon completion of the home theater.

Beyond a glass door, a stepped foyer leads ceremoniously to the auditorium. The corridor is a hushed space awash in the same rose, mauve and gray color scheme as the lobby of Radio City Music Hall. In fact, underfoot is a limited-edition F. Schumacher & Co. reproduction of the carpet that Donald Deskey created for the Manhattan landmark in 1932. “The carpet is the point of departure for the overall palette,” says Kalomirakis, who paired it with walls of rose velvet, brass reveals and, overhead, a coffered gray ceiling with Art Deco stenciling.

With a nod to Old Hollywood, silver-screen legends Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo, printed from old George Hurrell negatives, peer out from the rear wall of the theater. Ornate touches, such as the gold-leaf detailing of the columns, give the space a glamorous feel. (Click image to enlarge)

Cut-glass Sabino sconces and a sculpture in bas-relief positioned at the end of the foyer are part of the Art Deco collection the Joneses have amassed during their world travels. The owners found the light fixtures at Decodence, an antiques store in San Francisco.  The bas-relief, a painted plaster figure from the Pan-American exhibit at the 1933 Chi- cago World’s Fair, came from Off the Wall Antiques and from Weird Stuff, both in Los Angeles.

The pièce de résistance, of course, is the Savoy’s auditorium. The entrance is to the right of the bas-relief and through a door padded in the same soft rose velvet that bathes the walls. Inside the auditorium are three tiers of seating with four seats each. The plush theater chairs, also upholstered in rose velvet, offer ample leg room, a gentle rocking mechanism and, with a nod to modern creature comforts, cup holders for refreshments.

Remote controls part the motorized velvet theater curtain trimmed in silk bullion, revealing a 120-inch Stewart microperforated screen. A small Vidikron projector is discreetly mounted in the decorative ceiling. “When you press a button to start the movie, the overhead lights and the side sconces dim and the walkway lights come on,” Bill says, describing the show before the show.  All the while, big band music plays on the sound system.

Framing the screen are acoustical panels covered in a reproduction Frank Lloyd Wright fabric, punctuated by mahogany pilasters with glittering gold-leaf capitals. Two bronze-leaf grilles, patterned after elaborate elevator doors Kalomirakis saw in a Madison Avenue Art Deco building, are backlit through sheer fabric. Kalomirakis included them, as old American theaters often did, as an honorary nod to the royal box seats in Europe’s most luxurious theaters.

A reproduction of Donald Deskey’s Radio City Music Hall carpeting leads past a Jean Harlow photo and toward a sculpture from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. (Click image to enlarge)

Layer upon layer of meticulous detail adds up to a sumptuous whole that could easily be mistaken for the real thing. “The more you customize, the more character the theater will have and the more special the environment will be,” Kalomirakis says. “The [richer] your palette—using materials such as velvet, burl and bronze, not just boring wallboard—the more you can dazzle the audience. And that’s what it’s all about.”

The Jones family could not agree more: “Some people try to re-create the Art Deco look but don’t do a very good job,” Bill says. “That’s what you call Art Drecko. But this is very accurate. It looks like it was built in the’30s. To me, it’s the jewel in the crown.”