2008 CEDIA Electronic Lifestyles Award Winner

Hidden Installation: Silver Technical Design & Best Overall Winner

Electronic Systems Consultant: Amnet Technology Systems—Stamford, Conn.

Say your wife is pushing you to renovate a little-used room into a beautiful retreat that you can enjoy every day. And you’re a former Fordham University football player. And you love the architectural detailing of New Haven’s famed Temple Bar. The answer is simple: Just build a tavern-like space with lots of TVs, right? Not quite...

Every time the owners step foot into their golden home theater, they feel as if they’ve traveled back in time to their Italian honeymoon.

Consider this: A regular everyday person—not a big-name, highly-in-demand interior designer—masterminded every single detail of this elegant private screening room outside of Los Angeles.

While the wife doesn’t have any formal interior design training, she bravely orchestrated all of her home’s interiors from top to bottom.

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?

In this award-winning home, what’s new is meant to look old. Translation: This house was designed to resemble a finely restored Georgian home. And that means every ounce of technology is hidden and out of the way.

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.”

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.

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.

What to do if your son takes beer brewing very seriously, and Dad loves to knock back son’s brew with the guys while playing poker or taking in every Saturday or Sunday afternoon football game that’s on, whether it’s collegiate or professional?

In life, as in the home-building industry, timing is everything. For one family-owned homebuilder based outside of Portland, Oregon, the pivotal moment arrived in the form of an invitation to build one of six homes featured in the 2006 Street of Dreams home tour, which is hosted by the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland.

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.