Hillside lots, tall glass and the 4 p.m. glare problem
Half of Anthem is built on grade, stepping up the Black Mountain slopes, and the view is the reason people bought the house. It is also the reason a showroom picture mode falls apart at 4 p.m. Great rooms here face west through 8-foot sliders and clerestory glass, and the reflection lands square on the screen. Placement fixes most of it before calibration does: we angle the bracket 5 degrees where the glass sits opposite the TV, and where the wall gives us the choice we favor the side of the room that does not face the slider. Then we build two picture modes on the same input, a daytime setting with the backlight near full and a night setting that drops it, and we kill motion smoothing on both. Split-level and stepped floor plans on these lots also change the cable route, because the framing under a stepped floor does not run continuously the way it does on a flat pad. No basements to drop into anywhere in the valley, so the run stays in the wall. Setup adds 20 to 30 minutes.