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The Nucleus Immersive Room, Wow!house 2026, London

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Context

The Team

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Nucleus AV

L-Acoustics Services

System Calibration

Shaping Memory with Sound: The Nucleus Immersive Room

WOW!house is an annual showhouse staged at Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, presenting 22 distinct rooms crafted by an invited roster of architects and interior designers. Serving as the culmination of the visitor journey, The Nucleus Immersive Room, designed in partnership with Russell Sage Studio, relies on spatial audio as its core structural premise. Built around the concept of memory, the circular, cocooning interior invites visitors to interact with physical objects, such as letters, photographs, and heirlooms, hidden in bespoke drawers. Each object cues a corresponding shift in the room’s lighting, visual content, and soundscape, producing a highly interactive auditory experience.

The Challenge

A conventional 5.1 or 7.1 surround system was incompatible with the design brief because channel-based audio anchors sound to fixed speaker positions. The Momentarium required an audio solution that could move fluidly with the listener as the room’s atmospheric state changed. Additionally, the interior design demanded a visually unbroken aesthetic, meaning all hardware needed to remain completely out of sight.

The Solution

Nucleus specified the L-Acoustics HYRISS (Hyperreal Immersive Sound Space) platform after experiencing its capabilities at the L-Acoustics showroom in Highgate. HYRISS merges L-ISA for object-based source positioning, Ambiance for room acoustic adaptation, and the Anima engine to process content for the exact space and moment. To deliver this immersive landscape while maintaining a visually unbroken interior, the team completely concealed the loudspeakers behind acoustically transparent fabric, treating sound as a foundational architectural tool.

The audio deployment is built around 17 X4i coaxial loudspeakers, which are supported by 12 SB6i subwoofers to handle the low-end frequencies. System drive and signal distribution are managed by two LA1.16i amplified controllers, alongside a single LC16D and two LS10 network switches. At the core of the processing chain, an L-ISA Processor II runs the Anima engine to dynamically adapt the room’s acoustic behavior, working in tandem with a P1 processor dedicated to Ambiance room acoustic transformation. The bespoke auditory environment is further enhanced by two original pieces of music, composed specifically for the room by Krishna Jhaveri and Sanaya Ardeshir using L-ISA Studio.

The Result

The integration of HYRISS allows the Momentarium to pivot immediately between cinema, spatial music, live concert reproduction, and ambient soundscapes without requiring any hardware changes. The adaptability of the system ensures the room functions perfectly as a memory-trigger environment, placing a fragment of music precisely behind a listener’s shoulder or shifting the soundtrack the exact moment a drawer is opened.

Project photos

Sound had to cocoon the room, create movement, support the visual content, and help transform the overall atmosphere. HYRISS is what makes the room different. It allows the Momentarium to become more than a beautiful space with AV integrated. It’s a room that can shift, tell stories, and create a lasting emotional response. That was always the core ambition of the project.