The folks over at Electronic House have been running a Homes of the Year feature, and they've turned up a bunch of luxury homes with amazing entertainment systems that are cunningly disguised in the design. The array includes an entire old-style velvet and starry-ceiling home theater with an entrance door concealed behind a mirror; a luxury bathroom with his-and-hers vanities with concealed mirror LCD TVs and a temperature-controlled wine cellar with glass walls and adjustable color lighting system. Check out a selection of photos of these luxury installations in the gallery.
These homes have features that include: swiveling TVs that can be viewed either from the game room or the kitchen; TVs that descend from the ceiling at the foot of the bed; spa baths with built-in speakers; automatic Lutron sunshades to dim the light for perfect TV viewing while still letting you see the sea view; 7000W surround-sound systems; and motorized theatre-screen curtains. Each piece by itself might not be all that amazing, but when you put them all together in one house it has pretty impressive results.
In terms of tech, these houses are blessed with such gizmos as Crestron home control touchscreens, rack-mounted ADA Sirius satellite radio tuners, Niveus hard drive media servers and CinemaScope screens with Runco 3-chip 1080p DLP projectors with an anamorphic lens. Basically, heaps of stuff that makes our own home entertainment systems look unbearably wimpy in comparison.
How much does this kind of installation cost? We're not sure. But when you're talking about digging a 14-foot hole beneath your garage and calling in expert designers to help with the interior and AV features, you know it's going to be just as expensive as it looks. [Electronic House]