Opinion: The home cinema might not be humble or stylish, but it'll always be the dream

When I was a child, the only person I’d ever heard of having a cinema in his home was George Lucas. At the time, I worshipped him as a god (he hadn’t made the prequels yet), so it should not be surprising that I still see the idea of having a home theatre as right up there with owning a private jet or island.

Over the years, however, home cinemas have been a kind of luxe example of trickle-down economics – first, they were in mansions, then McMansions and today they can even be found in the specially dug-out basements of inner-city terraces (it’s one room that definitely doesn’t need windows).

During the seemingly endless years we recently spent smashing our heads into walls and crying – sorry, I mean looking for a new home, bidding at auctions, failing, etc – I made it my mission to try and talk my dearly beloved into buying a house with a cinema, or even the less-grand-sounding “media room”.

I was so keen on achieving this, in fact, that I took an otherwise inexplicable interest in houses I would otherwise have shuddered at. We would go to look at something that looked like it had been designed by Liberace’s poodle trainer in a suburb that my wife knew I loathed, and yet I would implore her to let us buy it if it had a home cinema.

I showed an interest in houses with front yards made entirely of concrete and oohed enthusiastically over the kind of gabled garbage I despised, as long as there was a big room with a screen in it.

My wife would then bring up the undeniable and unmissable fact that all of these media rooms were fitted with hideous and gauche-awful chairs and ask me how I thought I could furnish a home cinema without committing style crimes.

At the time, I was thrilled to be writing a column, for Domain Prestige, that reviewed things like Ferraris, floating gin-palace boats and home cinemas, and so I was able to inform her of the existence of D-Box Motion chairs, which bring 4D action to the very best cinemas, and are something of a bargain at around $10,000 per seat, plus another $5000 for the motion controller.

Can you spell “bargain”?

Local expert David Moseley explained to me that these chairs have incredibly fast actuators and that I could buy special versions of my favourite films where the motion had been coded in to improve my viewing experience in a physical way. “I’ve seen a single frame of a movie – so one 24th of a second – with 16 pieces of scripted motion taking place in the seat,” Moseley, the director of Wavetrain Cinema, explained.

“The frame with all that scripted motion is from The Bee Movie, where a frisbee goes whizzing past your ear, and the seat vibrates, just on that side, so you not only hear it but feel it moving.”

It was at around this point that my partner fixed me with that special look, the one that somehow communicates to me that the only word in her mind at that point is “divorce”.

Suffice to say, we bought a house without a media room, which means, sadly, that I now suffer from overwhelming home-cinema envy.

Recently one of my neighbours casually mentioned that his house had a cinema and I pestered him as politely as possible to let me come and see it. I wish I hadn’t.

Goodness but it is vast, and impressive, and no I don’t care that its four seats are enormously ugly and fitted with giant, glowing cup holders that change colours (they’re not D-Box Motion chairs though, cheapskate). What really blew me away, though, was not just the fact that his screen seemed actual movie-theatre sized, but the sound system.

It was so loud that when particularly action-intense scenes came on screen, all of the oxygen seemed to be shoved out of the room by the intensity. I thought my ears were going to implode and kiss each other inside my skull.

My 10-year-old daughter covered her ears at one point, shrieked and ran off to find her mother (who, typically, had refused to come with me). The lucky fellow who owned it had gone to the trouble of soundproofing the room, and I now realise that was so his neighbours wouldn’t call the police. I intend to become his new best friend before the new Top Gun movie comes out on DVD.

Considering my deep love of home cinemas, I was extremely disturbed to read recently that they are going out of fashion, with people’s new fascination with working from home leading to many being replaced with home offices or extra bedrooms.

This, as George Lucas (who can at least call sitting in his home cinema “work”) would tell you, is an enormous mistake and a retrograde step. But if anyone would like to sell me theirs, I reckon I could get it into my back yard with a crane.