Building a home theater out of thin air requires both adaptation and flexibility.

When a hip, young Los Angeles real estate developer/entrepreneur decided to add a home theater to his Los Angeles-area home, he knew exactly what he wanted—right down to the color scheme and seating configuration.

How to incorporate the theater into his existing home, however, was another question.

Contest Winner cyberManor shows what's possible with this award winning Sunnyvale, CA home.

Microsoft, seeing the potential of their Media Center in a custom install environment, started a contest for the best install that was based around one of their Media Center PC (or, as the case may be, PCs).

As you can imagine, each entry was based on how well they integrated the Media Center, along with the gymnastics sounding "technical merit" and creativity/originality.

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.”

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.

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 male and female species are wildly different in how they communicate, how they interpret a conversation—and how they watch television. "He's the channel surfer," says Debbie of her husband Robert, a former music industry executive. "He's constantly moving, so we end up watching TV in different locations." Debbie's TV-viewing habits involve watching several TV shows simultaneously. If she wanders from her office into another room, she likes to stay tuned to the programs that are playing in her office. "It's hard for me to sit and just watch TV," she says.

Some things are worth the wait, especially when it comes to designing the home theater of your dreams. Such is the case with 42-year-old homeowner Brian Hill of Coto de Caza, Calif. Hill is the owner of Discount Dance Supply, one of the largest dancewear retailers in the world, but the gear junkie admits that audio and video are his passions.

Several years ago, a young couple purchased two ocean-view lots in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. They quickly drew up design plans with Landry Design Group—the Los Angeles firm headed by well-known architect Richard Landry that has designed homes for Eddie Murphy, Sylvester Stallone, Wayne Gretzky and Sugar Ray Leonard.

But before the couple began construction, they spotted a Spanish-style house