How to use smart lighting to create the ultimate home theater experience

It might be subtle, but lighting is a crucial part of your home theater setup. Sure, you could just sit in total darkness when it’s time for the movie to start, but a system of layered ambient and task lighting will set the mood, prevent distractions, and prevent you tripping over. Nobody wants to spend their movie night mopping spilled drinks off their rug, or digging popcorn out from between the cushions.

Whether you’re lucky enough to have a whole room to turn into a dedicated home theater using one of the best 4K projectors , or whether you've just built a great home theater setup in your living room using one of the best TVs , adding a combination of the best smart lights will give you the flexibility to recreate an authentic cinematic experience.

Choosing lights from the same ecosystem (such as Philips Hue or Govee) will generally help ensure color temperatures are consistent and make it easier to apply a ‘scene’ across the whole room, but with more and more smart lights now compatible with the Matter smart home standard, it’s getting much easier to mix and match brands and products to create exactly the right setup for your space. This will make them easier to control, and enable you to group them together so you can operate task and ambient lighting separately, or have them all collected together to control with a single voice command. Our complete guide to Matter explains everything you need to know.

The important thing is how easy smart lighting is to control. You can choose individual brightness levels and colors for individual lights, and tie them all together into 'scenes' – so with the tap of one button in an app (or one request to one of the best smart speakers ), you switch instantly from bright lights to movie lighting, and back again – and you can have multiple mid-level options to help you get in the mood for movie magic.

Light a full home theater

Safety is paramount, but thoughtfully placed lighting can highlight any potential hazards without spoiling the mood. Smart LED strip lights (such as the Govee LED Strip Light M1 or Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus ) would be an easy and affordable way to highlight the edge of any steps for safety, and can offer just enough guidance to get you from your seats to your bathroom without tripping over anything expensive. You can dial them down to a very soft glow once the movie has started.

Speaking of which, ambient lighting will provide a soft glow while you get settled, and can be turned down when the show is ready to start. For the walls, dimmable sconces would be the most traditional choice, offering soft light that doesn’t project too far into the room. You can find some beautiful art deco sconces (vintage and reproduction) online, which can be fitted with smart bulbs to give you total control over brightness and color temperature.

Alternatively, the Philips Hue Liane and Sana wall lights is a modern take on the sconce, with a slim design and a bulb that faces the wall for indirect illumination.

Cove lighting (around the top of the walls, just below the ceiling) is another good option for ambient light. Again, you can achieve this with LED strips, which can be either self-adhesive or attached using clips. Just take care when fitting it around corners. Strips don’t take well to being bent sharply, so you may need to cut the strip and use a connector to get around tight spaces. Make sure you read the instructions for your strips carefully before getting started.

For a finishing touch, star ceilings are increasingly popular in home theaters, giving the effect of watching a movie under a night sky. It’s an effect that’s usually created using fiber optics, but you could achieve something similar using carefully positioned string lights (such as Twinkly Strings) on the ceiling, with a subtle white glow.

Convert your living room

If you don’t have the luxury of remodelling a whole room, smart lighting is the key to transforming any room into a home theater. With a little planning, your lounge or bedroom can be ready to turn from a living space to a movie palace whenever you want.

Your lights will need to serve dual purposes, so think creatively. If you can invest in a little labor for the initial fitting, recessed spotlights provide unobtrusive lighting and can be tilted so the lighting is angled exactly where you need it, whether you’re settling down for a movie, playing board games, or just chatting with the family in the living room.

Low level lighting just under the edge of your couch can help prevent tripping and create a more atmospheric feel on movie nights, but will be totally invisible when not in use.

Also consider your floor lights and table lamps, which can serve as useful task lighting during the day and provide extra ambience on movie nights when fitted with smart bulbs. The Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance Starter Kit has everything you need to begin, including the Hue Bridge that connects the bulbs to your home Wi-Fi network. Just being able to set all these to dimmer levels with one button push may be all you need.

You can also give your home theater space a personal touch by using lighting to highlight your movie poster collection. Philips Hue, Govee and the other big smart lighting brands don’t have their own picture lights (which makes sense, since they don’t benefit from variable colors), so why not improvise by fitting a standard picture light with a regular halogen bulb, and controlling it using a smart switch (our guide to the best smart switches has several good options).

Finally, think about the space behind and around your TV. If you have a Philips Ambilight TV such as the excellent Philips OLED809 (alas, not available in the US) you'll already know how effective its dynamic backlighting can be at increasing immersion, adding extra dimension by changing colors to match what's happening on screen.

You don't need to upgrade your set to get the same experience, either – there are Ambilight alternatives that stick to the back of your TV and monitor what's on screen, allowing them to create a similar effect. The Nanoleaf 4D screen mirror lights are our top-rated option, offering block color to reflect the main color currently displayed on your TV, or true screen extension, which extends colors from the edge of the screen.

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