Talking cinephile tech with home theater pioneer Theo Kalomirakis

By 2015, Prospect Heights will be home to both the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and the NHL’s New York Islanders, but few Brooklyn residents know that the current site of the Barclays Center is only a few blocks from the location of one of the first home movie theaters.

In 1984, Theo Kalomirakis, then an editor at Money Magazine, and several friends invested in a brownstone on Brooklyn’s Saint Marks Place. They built a dedicated space to watch movies away from the distractions of their apartments.

“My dream had always been to own my own theater and watch movies in it day and night,” Kalomirakis wrote in a 2013 blog post.

The windowless space boasted three rows of seats on risers, a projector, screen and speakers — a far cry from the home theaters that Kalomirakis now builds. It was an anomaly at the time, Kalomirakis said, and gained press attention from his coworkers and friends in media who attend the showings.

“They were so impressed that there was some crazy kid in Brooklyn who had created a home theater,” he recalled in a recent interview.

The media attention had unexpected results.

Newspaper readers wanted their own cinemas and Kalomirakis was inspired to create a second, more ornate one on Union Street, called the Roxy. By 1990, he had quit his editing job to build miniature movie palaces for wealthy clients.

By 2008, he was building 80 theaters a year in the U.S., India, Dubai, Russia and China.

Last month, thirty years after the construction of his first theater, Kalomirakis unveiled his newest creation in his Prospect Heights penthouse: The Roxy 2.0, a connected theater for the Internet age.

Inside the Roxy 2.0. (Photo courtesy of Cybill Cempron/Vantage PR)

The Roxy 2.0 and Kalomirakis’s apartment are automated through a Crestron central console. He can open the blinds, turn on the lights and control the theater through wall-mounted remote controls or a set of iPads.

This is a very important thing for the homeowner who can afford to automate their life.

“For example, you’re in your theater,” he said. “You won’t be able to answer the bell. You don’t want to go out and interrupt the pleasure of watching a movie … but automation brings the objects of the household to [your] fingertips.”

The various components — light switches, drapes and entertainment system — communicate with each other through a wireless mesh, instead of simply receiving a message from a central antenna. When a component receives a signal intended for another component, it relays it. The combined relayed signals create a stronger and more reliable signal.

Kalomirakis’s personal collection of 14,000 films is also automated, stored on a Kaleidescape movie server. At the touch of a button, a stored film appears on the Stewart CineCurve screen. (The discs themselves are kept on floor-to ceiling shelves, which line the hallway leading to the theater.)

Unlike movies streamed from Netflix or another service, the films stored on the Kaleidescape server have full Blu-ray-level resolution and sound, delivered on ultra-thin California Audio Technology speakers. But Kalomirakis is not against streaming.

“I am very much pro-streaming. You are able to put in your fingertips movies that were not available before,” he said. “I have access from the theater to over 3,000 movies that I don’t have in my library. But I’m a little bit of a purist … when I have a movie on Blu-ray, I will watch it on Blu-ray because of the picture quality.”

“For me,” he added, “high resolution means high proximity to the quality of the movies … I can’t wait to go to the next phase of transforming my library to 4K.”