Designer Smart Home

London, SW15

An elegantly designed home with many lighting and decor features needed a reliable and simple to use home automation interface for the whole family to live with

Living Room with smart connected TV and Lutron controlled lighting. Meridian active digital speakers hidden in the ceiling provide audiophile sound in this room without breaking decor

The Crestron remote control can bring up Sky TV, Apple TV or the Movie collection on any TV in the home

The kitchen is the centre of activity in this home with it's elegant lighting design to complement the handmade kitchen. Lutron takes care of the lighting and shading in here, controlled from the touchscreen or the lighting keypad you can see on the wall

Even the Kitchen TV is linked to the Kaleidescape Movie server containing all of the family's movie collection ready for instant playback

Discrete bedside Lutron controls can set the lighting scene and open the sheer shades or lower the automated roman blinds. Using the touchscreen by the door the homeowner can close all the blinds and turn off all the lights in the house at the press of a button

A whole family of athletes needed a big sound system in the gym. Four Triad Silver series monitor speakers and two Triad Subs all reside in the ceiling, controlled from the touchscreen on the wall or the Roon music app. And yes that is a climbing wall

At the running track end of the gym the smart TV is linked to the bike for an immersive online experience. Crestron keeps this linked also to the sound system in the gym

The incredible Roon music platform curates the client's music library and provides the ability to play music in any of the twelve audio zones

Under the hood lies Meridian's audiophile multi-room players and power amplifiers providing Roon or TV audio to the various zones in the house (and garden)

Equipment

Crestron Custom Home Automation system
Crestron Touchscreens and Wireless Remote Controls
2N Door Entry linked to Crestron Touchscreen Intercom
Lutron Homeworks Lighting Control throughout
Lutron Motorised Roller shades and custom Roman blinds throughout
Motorised Velux windows and blinds on top floor
Roon Nucleus Audio Server
Meridian 218 zone controllers and 258 power amps
Meridian DSP active speakers and Triad Silver passive speakers
Kaleidescape Strato Movie System linked to all TVs
Underfloor heating integration
CCTV System with camera view on touchscreens
Enterprise Grade Network with dual ISPs balanced together and UPS backup
Reference Family Movie Room

Project Brief

The main focus of this designer home was the lighting design and window treatments, and their fundamental impact on the rest of the décor. At the press of a button a change in the lighting scene and lowering or raising a fabric over the window will change the mood of the room dramatically. The challenge on our part is to give the family this power to control their environment without making it complicated, or clunky, or worse unreliable. A Lutron homeworks system managing lighting and window treatments throughout the property was the obvious choice. It has a clean simple to use app should the client want to tweak their own lighting scenes, and a well-earned reputation for bulletproof reliability and integration possibilities for us to integrate with the Crestron automation system.

The Crestron system features throughout the home either via app, touchscreen or wireless remote control, and gives our client a single interface to manage his smart home. Whether this be opening all the blinds in the morning, turning off all the lights at night, playing a song, watching something from the Kaleidescape movie system, adjusting the heating or viewing a security camera.

The music system in this house is something rather special though, using the Roon platform for library management and playback in CD or studio master quality audio in any room in the house. Using the feature rich Roon app the music server in the basement streams lossless quality music to any of the Meridian 218 zone controllers that either feed the signal digitally direct to Meridian DSP speakers, or through Meridian 258 power amps to Triad Silver series monitor speakers throughout various zones. Every room in this house is an audio fan’s dream with quality music from a rich, simple to use interface

As with all our smart home projects, the house is bolstered with an enterprise grade wired and wireless data network. In this case bonding both cable and VDSL internet feeds to reduce downtime to an absolute minimum. The whole network including the Crestron control system is protected with UPS backup, and monitored from our office for any anomalies and failures so we can respond to the site before the homeowner might even know anything is up

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