A private cinema that behaves like the rest of the house.

A dedicated cinema room in a family villa — cinema-grade sound and picture, without a rack of remotes or a room that only one person knows how to operate.

The room was handed to us as a shell with a projector position and a seating layout. Everything else — acoustics, sightlines, cabling routes, lighting scenes and control — was ours to resolve alongside the main contractor's programme.

The controlling decision was to treat the cinema as one more zone of the villa's automation rather than a self-contained system. One keypad by the door, the same app the family already used, and scenes that dim the corridor, close the shades and drop the screen in a single press.

Speaker placement was set from the seating positions rather than the ceiling grid, so the acoustic layout drove the joinery instead of the other way round. The result is a room where nothing is on show: no visible cable, no equipment in the space, and a single copper-lit keypad as the entire interface.

Everything behind the wall.