Electronic House 2013 Home of the Year Awards

We follow the folks over at Electronic House and are particularly enamored with their annual Home of the Year Awards. This is where they select from literally hundreds of entries to come up with the home installations that are the very best among the various categories and budget ranges. For the 2013 Home of the Year Awards we checked out the 12 different categories, some of which included several finalists in Gold, Silver and Bronze designations. I think that, after seeing them, you'll agree that any of these homes would be impressive. And that's just on the surface. Any time you're impressed with the look and layout of a home theater or whole-house audio/video system—just imagine all the work it took to design it, lay it out and, of course, install the system.

Without further ado, here are just some of our favorites. To get the entire list of homes and to see all the photos, check out the 2013 awards page at Electronic House.

Best Home Theater Under $25,000

This before and after install really impressed us. After all, not every house is designed with a room that has the perfect dimensions for the perfect home theater. In fact, unless someone was thinking about it when houses are being built, most aren’t. So, custom electronics professionals often are tasked to work with odd size rooms and turn them into stand-out home theaters. It’s one of these type of jobs that earned Innerspace Electronics of Port Chester, N.Y., well-deserved kudos for this one. "Blah" really became "Bravo!" as the room was infused with technology, including a 96-inch screen from Stewart Filmscreen, architectural B&W speakers and an in-wall Triad subwoofer. 

And the runner-up Silver Winner wasn't too shabby either. This is a 4K renovation fits in a home measuring just 1,200 square feet. With every square inch being fully utilized, how do you put one in? Simple: you utilize the basement. Usually, a lower level is a great spot for a theater. It’s dark, set apart from the rest of the house and if it’s unfinished offers a plethora of design options.

And then, of course, you have the category I personally enjoy the most: 

Best Home Theater $150,000 or more

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was this elegant, reference-performance home theater. Nor was it built in a few months or even a couple of years. From build-out to final tweaking this 45-seat cinema took four years to complete, to the tune of more the $3 million.

And then there's the runner-up home theater that had a build price of around...well, if you have to ask you probably can't afford it. In any case, it’s practically faux pas to install loudspeakers in a dedicated home theater without them being hidden in some manner. Typically they’re covered by acoustical fabric on the walls, concealed in columns, or beaming down from round speaker grilles within the ceiling. But if the surround speakers are going to stay out in the open, at least keep the grilles on them, right? Not in this dazzling home theater, where eight in-wall speakers as part of a whopping 11.1-channel audio system sit virtually naked, grille-less as they blare concerts and movie soundtracks. It’s a speaker aesthetic that’s usually reserved for two-channel listening rooms, where towering floorstanding speakers often look more majestic without the black fabric covers. It’s also a more common sight in professional recording studios, where speaker aesthetics just don’t require as much consideration—but pristine sound quality does.

You may not be able to afford either of these home theater, but, like us, you can certainly enjoy looking at them. Head over to Electronic House's website to see even more—you won't be disappointed!