Stadium Seating Design for a Home Theater

When we built our home theater, we had the vision of stadium seating with two rows of recliner seats whereby the back row of seats was higher than the front row. We wanted to make sure that there was no bad seat in the house. I remember in my house layout plans that I showed a box where I thought we would position the seating, and I had a best guess as to the approximate size of the overall seating.

But when it came time for the contractor to actually build a deck, he asked me what dimensions I would like to build it to, and at the time I had not thought it thought far enough ahead of time. He gave me the night to think about it, and my wife I an set about trying to figure out the best elevation, width and length that would work for our given room size. In this article I will review our plans and options, and provide you with some insights into our experience as well as some thoughts and recommendations for you to ponder.

As we set out to determine our best elevations with respect to the room layout, we already had the overall dimension of the room width and length in place, and the framing had already been installed for the walls. So we had the fixed dimensions of the room, and we were now able to walk about the room and test our planned seating arrangement. We knew where the TV was to be positioned, although had not decided upon the height of the TV to be mounted. We knew the approximate dimensions of the TV, but we had not yet purchased a new unit. We knew the approximate dimensions of the chairs, but we had not purchased, or even decided upon which chairs we would purchase. We had only limited space in our home theater room, due to the fixed dimensions of our basement and our decided upon room layout. So we had some information, yet several items were undecided, and we now were faced with a decision to be made on the deck size, and height, and we had to determine the TV height as well to make our layout with an unblocked view for all seats in the room.