I love getting the call from homeowners looking to take their living experience to the next level.
Naturally, most conversations about renovating older homes in San Francisco focus on modernizing systems, and realigning functionality and aesthetics with our current times. But In this article, I would like to focus on something that is not only a personal passion of mine, but a hidden and often overlooked opportunity to drastically improve enjoyment and quality of life that most clients underestimate the importance of until they have experienced the results
What I’m referring to is something (that homeowners look back on and call to tell me they just didn’t know how they ever lived without., a well thought out home entertainment setup can improve your quality of life in ways you may not have realized were possible
In this article, I want to share my thoughts on the home theater and why paying special attention to the audio portion matters more than most homeowners realize when renovating older homes in San Francisco. As a musician, and audiophile, I’ll admit I have a bias here. But getting the sound right can transform how you experience everything much more than going big on the monitor. And the research backs me up.
The Most Overlooked Detail When Renovating Older Homes
It seems Everyone appreciates the value of a great TV. Size, resolution, picture quality; all these are things people research for weeks before buying yet sound itself, is almost always an afterthought. A soundbar, maybe. The TV’s built-in speakers if nobody pushes back. Often, it doesn’t come up at all until the room is finished and the walls are closed, and you might end up with something that looks cluttered and doesn’t sound as good as it could.
And something just feels off. You might not feel that relaxed, or you might even feel fatigued as your brain struggles to discern dialogue and spatial cues.
Here’s what the research consistently shows: a modest screen paired with a high-performance sound system significantly outperforms a large TV with inferior audio. The experience gap is not close. And when you understand why, it makes complete sense.
It’s what takes you from watching a show to an at-home cinematic experience.Not the first thought for people when renovating older homes, but it should be!
When it comes down to it, most of what we actually watch is dialogue-driven. Not car chases and explosions. Conversations, speeches, the quiet tension between two characters in a scene. When speakers underperform, the brain works overtime trying to fill in what it can’t quite make out. That’s why you turn on subtitles. That’s why you feel fatigued or even have a headache after two hours of television. It isn’t the screen that’s exhausting you. It’s your brain straining against bad sound.
The second part of the equation is our spatial awareness. Our minds are actually really good at using sound to comprehend spatial environments. When the echoes and reverberations don’t make sense (and don’t match what we see) our brains struggle, and we get fatigued, and enjoy less.
That said, car chases and explosions are a part of the equation, and a high performing home theatre can really add to the fun.
For anyone who thinks analytically about systems (and in my experience, a lot of San Francisco homeowners do), this concept reframes the entire design decision. The display and the sound are separate outputs, but together they form the experience, and they need to work in synergy
The Room Is Doing More Work Than You Think
Here’s another aspect of a home theater project that surprises most people: the room itself has at least as much, if not more impact on what you hear than the sound system you buy (assuming it is a decent one). This is the insight that separates a thoughtfully designed space from an expensive disappointment.
The size and shape of the room really matter. And this is something that we often have control over when we’re renovating older homes.
Then there are the effects of surfaces on reflection and absorption. You can go very deep here with acoustic consultants, but basic measures will get you great results. A good general guideline is that a room needs roughly 30% of its surfaces covered in absorptive and diffusive materials to manage the reflections and reverberations that kill clarity, without making things sound dead by killing all reverberations. Hard plaster walls and hardwood floors (which is what you’ll find in virtually every Victorian renovation in San Francisco) are acoustically brutal. Sound bounces. Bass gets boomy. The dialogue gets muddy. Your brain interprets that sonic confusion as spatial disorientation, and the result is fatigue.
The good news: acoustic treatment doesn’t have to look like a recording studio. Upholstered furniture absorbs. Rugs absorb. Well-placed bookcases diffuse. Curtains, sculptural wall pieces, and soft furnishings all do real acoustic work while looking exactly the way you’d want a living room to look. For clients who want to go further, acoustic fabrics and even acoustic plaster systems hide treatment entirely behind a finished surface. You’d never know it was there.
This is the kind of forethought that pays off when renovating older homes, especially in San Francisco, where spaces serve multiple functions, and we are a lot more limited in their size & configuration than in the suburbs.
What To Do (And When The Window Is Open)
If you take one action, make it this: invest in a dedicated center-channel speaker positioned directly under your TV and powered by a home theater receiver. Not a soundbar. Even the best soundbars are consistently outperformed by a decent passive speaker and a proper amplifier. The center channel is where dialogue lives. Get that right, and the entire experience improves immediately.
From there, adding left and right channel speakers gives you a full stereo foundation. And if you want the full experience that modern programming is built around, Dolby Atmos adds overhead and spatial effects that envelope you and drastically add to the experience . The infrastructure for all of this (minimally, roughing in speaker wire in the correct locations, even if you may add the speakers later) costs almost nothing to install while a renovation is underway. Retrofitting after the walls close is a different conversation entirely. You do need someone who knows how to locate them: either a qualified consultant, or an architect who happens to be an audio geek.
This is the window. Renovating older homes in San Francisco is rarely cheap or fast, and the acoustic and wiring decisions you skip today are the ones you’ll pay to redo later.
The Call I Always Get
I worked on a project not long ago where the homeowner was skeptical from the start. Great TV, she told me. Sound is not important and I don’t like speakers. . I convinced her to let me address the system as part of the renovation scope, the condition being that speakers were stealthy and elegant. When it was finished, she called and said she honestly didn’t know how she had lived without it.
That made this audiophile architect feel warm and fuzzy.
I get some version of that call regularly, not always about sound. About the lighting that adds drama and excitement to the spaces we conceived. About the open floor plan that flows with the family’s life.. About the kitchen that solved all their bottlenecks while looking fantastic.. These are the details that make the difference between a home that was renovated and a home that was transformed. And they all start with a conversation before design begins, not after.
If you’re renovating older homes in San Francisco and want to understand what’s actually possible on your site before committing to a design direction, I’d love to talk. My free 40-minute Design Discovery Session is exactly that, a chance to think through the full picture before a dollar goes toward design.