A homeowner, who built a private screening room for his family to enjoy, has fallen in love with it himself.

Walk into this gigantic 2,600-square-foot home theater and try to envision the kind of person who would build a private screening room of this magnitude. It’s probably owned by a man, right? It’s extremely masculine in style with polished wall-to-wall woodworking, two bold rows of sturdy-yet-handsome leather recliners, and a red velvet theater curtain with gold tassel fringe.

The no-nonsense design is confident. Bold. Refined. Sophisticated. This is a serious space for serious entertaining. Or is it?

Noted home theater designer Theo Kalomirakis has learned that a snooty attitude can sometimes accompany the celebrities who hire him.

“They think everybody else is below them,” he says, with a chuckle. So he was surprised, not to mention flattered, when on a first meeting a Hollywood movie star client asked him to autograph a copy of his book, Great Escapes: New Designs for Home Theaters by Theo Kalomirakis.

A Chicago high-rise retreat

This pied-a-terre in Chicago’s River North neighborhood gives new meaning to the phrase “date night.” “We raise our four kids in the west suburbs of Chicago,” says Jon Butcher. In describing his 3,500-square-foot, Japanese-inspired condominium, he explains, “This is where we come to get away from our kids. We use this as our date place.”

Introduced in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, and popularized by Walt Disney in 1954, the Nautilus is still the most famous of all submarines. Kirk Douglas and James Mason starred in the movie, but the novel’s menacingly sharklike vessel, with its opulent Victorian interior, was the real star, and ignited the dreams and imagination of many a youngster.

If Jeffrey Smith hasn’t seen it all in his 33 years in the theater-design business, he has come pretty close. But when the president of First Impressions Theme Theatres in North Miami looked around at the last unfurnished room in this two-story, 12,000-square-foot Miami home, he was blown away by the space’s extraordinary marble floors and intricate crown molding.

Theater design luminary Jeff Smith collaborates with a style-savvy client in creating a glamorous home theater for a South Florida vacation home.

“Build a theater around this,” the wife said to First Impressions Theme Theaters’ founder and theater designer Jeff Smith, as she handed him a sample of animal-print carpeting.

“There was something about it that spoke to me,” she says. “I felt the tiger print motif would impart a sense of drama and elegance.”

Once upon a time, “ranch living” conjured up images of barnlike structures in a dusty, remote locale.

Fast-forward to now, where a spectacular 20,000-square-foot home sited in Ranch Colony Estates dispels all preconceived notions of what a home on the range should be.

A capacious mountain getaway, designed for family and business retreats, is sprinkled with technological treats that are easy to use.

There’s a certain ruggedness—a rough-and-tumble way of life—in Colorado that’s as irresistible to the locals who run the ski mountains as it is to the well-heeled who build vacation homes from the ground up.