"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.

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.

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.

Some people would tear down a beautiful historic movie theater just, just …” says 43-year-old Robert Bucksbaum, a single-screen movie theater owner. He hesitates over the words. “Just to make money!”

Even though his gargantuan home is still not fully complete, when businessman Don Rogers wants to decompress, he and his wife, Suzanne, stop by the site to take in a movie.

Rogers made all the right moves when preparing to build his future theater: He set aside 600 square feet on the home’s ground level, he hired Theo Kalomirakis, the Christopher Columbus of home theater design, and had the foresight to step back in terms of aesthetics, giving Kalomirakis carte blanche to orchestrate the interiors as he saw fit.

What was originally planned as a room where the family of four would burn off stress and melt away pounds morphed into a space of another function—a place where the family of four would prop up their feet, relax, and burn very few calories.
 
“We had been in our house for 20 years and we were doing a remodel,” says the wife, adding that what started as a renovation turned into a major addition after they learned that the city wouldn’t allow them to add a second story to their pool cabana.

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.

You can almost hear the rippling of a silk peignoir in this red velvet home theater, which is as seductive as the boudoir of a 1920s screen siren. Astonishingly, this room originally had an unremarkable existence as a second-floor storage area, but in the hands of Orlando architect Doug Tachi of Loggia Architecture, it went from louche to luxe in a makeover worthy of a Hollywood starlet.