Earlier this spring, our team received the Smart Building Award for our London cinema project — judged on technical integration, acoustic engineering, and the quiet sympathy with which the technology disappeared into a beautiful piece of architecture. This article is the story of how that room came to be — and the principles that guided every design decision along the way.
The Brief: A Cinema That Disappears
Our client lives in a discreet Westminster townhouse — the kind of building where any visible technology would feel like a violation of the architecture. The brief was uncompromising: a reference-grade cinema room with Dolby Atmos object-based audio, 4K HDR projection, and acoustic performance to rival a commercial dub stage. But every speaker had to be invisible. Every cable concealed. Every wall finish in keeping with the rest of the home. The technology, in essence, had to vanish into the design.
This is the kind of brief that separates integration disciplines from product installers. It is straightforward to bolt black boxes to a wall. It is something else entirely to deliver concert-hall acoustics and cinematic dynamics from a room that, on first inspection, contains no obvious technology at all. The Smart Building Award judging panel paid particular attention to this point in their citation — the project succeeds aesthetically as well as technically, and that combination is rare.
Acoustic Architecture First, Equipment Second
The temptation in any cinema project is to start with the equipment list. We do the opposite. The first six weeks of any high-end cinema design are spent on the room itself — calculating modal distribution, specifying construction build-ups for STC isolation, designing the absorption and diffusion treatment, and modelling the speaker geometry against Dolby's room-tuning standards. The equipment is chosen after the room is right, not before.
For the London project, we worked with the architect from foundation stage. The cinema is acoustically isolated from the rest of the house with a fully-floating floor on neoprene pucks, double-stud walls with a 50mm air gap, and a resilient ceiling system suspended on isolation hangers. The room-within-a-room construction means a film at full reference level (105 dB peak) is reduced to inaudible levels in the corridor outside. Equally important, ambient noise from the rest of the house (HVAC, plumbing, footfall) is fully excluded — preserving the dynamic range of the cinema during quiet passages.
The Speaker Array: Hidden, Not Compromised
The cinema runs a 7.2.4 Dolby Atmos configuration: three front speakers, four surrounds, two subwoofers, and four overhead height channels. Every front and surround speaker is concealed behind acoustically-transparent fabric panels finished to match the wall treatment — visually indistinguishable from the surrounding architecture, acoustically transparent to within ±1 dB across the audible band.
The overhead channels are the most challenging element of any Atmos install. We worked with the joiner to integrate the four overhead drivers into a custom oak ceiling soffit — each driver rebated into a precision-routed pocket and faced with the same fluted oak as the surrounding architectural detail. From below, the ceiling reads as a continuous timber composition. Acoustically, the height channels deliver Dolby's spec for overhead dispersion without compromise. This is integration at the level of millimetres, not centimetres — and it is what separates an award-winning project from a competent one.
Lighting: A Cinematic Element in its Own Right
The cinema's lighting is by Lutron HomeWorks, with three layered scenes designed to elevate the experience: Foyer, Pre-Show, and Cinema. The Foyer scene is a warm hospitality glow — perfect for greeting guests as they take their seats. Pre-Show dims the room to a soft amber glow that permits movement and conversation while signalling that the film is imminent. Cinema reduces the room to near-blackout — a single line of toe-kick lighting at one percent for safety, every other source extinguished.
The transition between Pre-Show and Cinema runs over four seconds, synchronised with the projector's iris-open. The effect is unmistakably theatrical — a deliberate, choreographed dimming that signals the start of the film as much as any opening credit. It is the kind of detail that does not appear on any equipment list but that defines the cinematic quality of the space. The Smart Building Award panel singled out this transition specifically in their citation as an example of "design intelligence beyond simple automation."
What the Judges Said
The Smart Building Awards citation noted three things: first, the absolute commitment to architectural integration — “technology that has been designed-in, not retrofitted-on.” Second, the acoustic engineering — performance metrics that exceed the brief and approach commercial-grade cinema standards. Third, the operational simplicity — a room that delivers reference-grade performance from a single keypad press, with no technical knowledge required from the user.
It is the third point that we are proudest of. The room contains tens of thousands of pounds of carefully-specified equipment, but the user-facing experience is as simple as switching on a lamp. One button — “Cinema” — calibrates everything: projector ignition, audio amplifier wake-up, lighting transition, motorised screen drop, climate boost, blackout-shade closure. The complexity is hidden inside the engineering, not exposed to the user. That is what intelligent technology should look like in 2026.
What the Award Means for our Clients
Awards do not design rooms. People do. But sustained recognition by independent industry bodies — the Smart Building Awards, Snap One's EMEA Best Service award, the Control4 Circle of Excellence — does mean something to the clients who entrust us with significant projects. It means the work has been examined by peers, by manufacturers, by independent judges, and found to meet a standard.
For us, the Smart Building Award is not the end of a journey. It is the standard against which we now measure every project that follows. The next cinema we deliver will be designed against the same principles, with the same attention to detail, and ideally with the same architectural sympathy. Our clients in Cheshire, London, Dubai and Miami benefit from the lessons learned on the award project — every subsequent install draws on the engineering disciplines we proved during this one.
Could Your Project Be Next?
If you are planning a cinema room, a whole-home automation project, or an integration scheme of any scale, we would welcome a conversation. Every great room starts with the brief — and every great brief starts with a long, slow conversation about how the space should feel, not what equipment it should contain. Browse our project portfolio for examples of recent work, or speak to us directly to discuss your own.