A Disused, Garage Attic is Reimagined as a High-Performance 9.4.6 Immersive Theater

• Name & Location: Tejada Home Theater, Fairview, Texas
• Integrator: Home Theater Design Group, Dallas, Texas
• Award: 2026 Home of the Year, Best Before/After Retrofit, Gold

Set in Fairview, Texas, this retrofit is impressive just for how Home Theater Design Group (Group) managed to reverse engineer a garage attic into an acoustically-isolated 9.4.6 immersive home theater and listening room. It’s so impressive that you’d almost be inclined to think that the space was designed with that purpose in mind from the very start. The reality, however, is a story told in constraints and plenty of creative problem solving.

A ‘golden trapagon’ solves the attic’s geometry problem

The room sported angled ceilings, existing HVAC equipment and plenty of structural boundaries that provided a trickle-down series of constraints for the Group. Screen size dictated speaker placement, speaker placement dictated seating, and seating dictated riser height, sightlines and calibration.

The Group ultimately worked the shape of the room itself into the AV design, opting for a  widening, non-parallel “Golden Trapagon” geometry so that it would work with the gear they were intending to put in.

Heavy isolation construction creates a sealed, serviceable shell

To quiet the space, the Group also built a substantial isolated shell using double 5/8-inch drywall and roughly 3,000 pounds of mass-loaded vinyl. Access was preserved behind the walls for HVAC, wiring and speaker maintenance, ensuring the finished room wouldn’t become a black box the moment construction wrapped.

A front equipment cubby, reachable through a concealed curtain, shortened critical audio cable runs while keeping electronics out of sight. Dedicated HVAC regulates temperature for the gear, while dedicated power circuits and hardwired networking further contribute to turning the former attic into a finished performance space.

The room kept evolving after the initial build

In describing its approach to developing space, the Group explained how it refined the attic in layers. Construction came first, then acoustics, speaker placement, subwoofer integration and finally, calibration, with each phase building on the infrastructure laid down before it.

Custom tuned-resonator acoustics were later integrated into the walls and ceiling while the main speakers and subwoofers were repositioned. Additional dedicated circuits were also added with the AV systems being calibrated and recalibrated with each pass until the final shape and profile of the room was finally present.

One room, four uses

What’s impressive about the build is that it doesn’t read as a converted attic. With defined signal paths and presets, the finished space functions as a two-channel listening room, a 9.4.6 cinema, a sports room or a demonstration space.

In one stroke, it shows how a home’s ,most constrained, difficult-to-reach square footage can become its most technically ambitious space. In another stroke, it showcases the level of effort and talent that goes into retrofitting old, disused spaces to support immersive audio and video systems.

This project is part of our coverage for the 2026 CE Pro Home of the Year Awards. Presented annually at CEDIA Expo alongside the BEST Product Awards, the Home of the Year Awards represent the best of the best smart home innovations within the CEDIA channel. Check to see when the next submission window is open in case you have a project you would like to submit and don’t want to miss your opportunity.