A modern cinema room with multiple sofas, decorative wall panels, and wall-mounted lamps in a custom color scheme.

Cinema Buro —

The Origin Story

Where engineering, architecture, and a shared obsession with exceptional experiences converge.

The story of Cinema Buro begins, as many good things do, with friends, a few beers, and a conversation that refused to stay small.

It was just after Covid. London was waking up again. Tables spilled onto pavements outside quirky pubs — spaces where people could talk freely again after years behind screens. One of those evenings became the quietspark that would eventually redefine what a privatecinema can be.

But the real story begins much earlier; For more than a decade, the roots of Cinema Buro were taking shape in parallel — in different countries, under different brands, but driven by the same frustrations.

Sphere Custom began its journey 12 years ago with a simple goal: to build private cinemas free from the constraints of brand bias and market politics.


Officina Acustica was founded in Italy (originally as HTE), with a singular focus: to create precision-engineered, turnkey acoustic interiors for private cinemas that delivered predictable, repeatable performance.


Cinema Lusso established itself in the UK to build private cinemas defined by engineering integrity — designing to performance targets, not product lists.

What we each individually saw in our markets was something we came to realise was an universal, regularly occurring compromise - Integration firms weren’t designing cinemas;

• They were selling products.
• There were no performance metrics.
• There wasn’t any engineering to back up designs.
• Ergonomics, feel and flow were not considered.
• Performance targets, don’t need them when you sell a box.
• No objective, repeatable, measurable outcome.

Just brands. And price tags.

That irritation grew into a mission, which ultimately led to establishing, and joining, the CEDIA RP22 working group — a rare gathering of like-minded individuals determined to reshape the industry through science, clarity, and performance-based standards.

After months of technical debates, standards discussions, and camera-off Zoom calls, it turned out we not only shared a common journey, but we shared a deep passion for that ultimate experience. That discovery led — inevitably — to the pub table, a round (or two) of beers, and the realisation that we had been independently working toward the exact same goal for years:

A return to performance-first cinema design.
A place where science meets craft.
A place free from brand bias.
A place to set a new benchmark.

That conversation planted the seed for a complete reimagining of what a cinema studio, a design office, and a performance lab could be. That concept became Foundry.

And from Foundry, the next evolution became obvious: Cinema Buro