The honest answer is that “home cinema” covers everything from a £6,000 garden room to a £150,000 dedicated room, and the biggest cost driver isn’t the equipment. It’s the room.
Cost by room type
| Room type | Typical cost ex-VAT | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Garden room / outbuilding | £6,450 – £12,000 | 5.1 surround, projector or large TV, automated lighting, blackout |
| Converted garage | £8,000 – £15,000 | As above plus insulation, heating and acoustic work |
| Spare bedroom / media room | £8,000 – £18,000 | Often a large TV rather than projector, room stays multi-use |
| Dedicated cinema room | £15,000 – £30,000+ | Tiered seating, full acoustic treatment, calibrated projection |
Where the money actually goes
On a typical £12,000 installation, the split is roughly:
- Screen and projection or display — 20–25%
- Audio: speakers, amplification, processing — 25–30%
- Room work: acoustics, blackout, insulation, decoration — 25–35%
- Lighting, automation and control — 10–15%
- Cabling, installation and calibration — 10–15%
The pattern people find surprising is that the room work rivals the electronics. It’s also the part that’s expensive to retrofit and cheap to do while the room is already open — which is why we push hard on getting cabling and acoustic decisions made early.
Where money gets wasted
Buying the screen before measuring the room. Screen size should come from seating distance — roughly 1.2 to 1.5 times the screen width as a viewing distance. Oversized screens in small rooms mean you scan the image instead of watching it, which is genuinely tiring.
Expensive speakers in an untreated room. Acoustics dominate perceived sound quality. £3,000 of speakers in a treated room beats £8,000 in a bare one, every time. Treat first, then spend what’s left.
A projector in a room you can’t black out. This is the most common expensive mistake. Projectors need light control; without it, contrast collapses and the image looks washed out no matter what you paid. In an uncontrollable room, buy a big TV and be happier.
Ignoring the lighting. A cinema with one bright ceiling light that someone flicks on mid-film is a compromised cinema. Dimmed wall washes, step lighting and a pause mode that lifts the room to about 30% cost comparatively little and change the experience completely.
The costs people forget
- Heating and insulation in a garage or outbuilding conversion
- Power — a dedicated circuit is often needed
- Ventilation for a sealed, well-insulated room with people and equipment in it
- Seating, which can run from £500 for a decent sofa to £2,000+ per cinema recliner
- Calibration, which is what makes good equipment actually perform
The cheapest route to a genuinely good cinema
A garden room or outbuilding, every time. You get acoustic isolation from the rest of the house, complete control over blackout because you specify the windows, no compromise over losing a bedroom, and cable routes that are still open. Our fixed-price garden-room cinema package covers a room of roughly 4m × 5m at £6,450 ex-VAT, installed in four to five days.
If you already have a garage that’s storing things you’d struggle to name, that’s usually the second-best option and often the best value in the house.
See our home cinema installation service → · Garden room cinema package →
Jack Jones
Director, Westgate Property Solutions · Loxone Silver Partner