Park Avenue

A good part of our work now happens outside Colorado, because clients who have lived with a system they trust would rather not start again with a stranger at their next property. We are asked to travel, and we do — this Upper East Side apartment at Park Avenue and 63rd was specified, installed and commissioned by the same people who look after the client's home in the valley.

There is a real argument for it beyond familiarity. A system built by the same integrator behaves the same way in both places: the keypads say the same words, the app looks identical, the scenes are named consistently, and a fault at either property reaches the same technician. Nobody has to learn a second house.

Lighting here is Control4, panelised — the dimming modules live on a board in a service closet and the walls carry engraved keypads instead of banks of dimmers. In a pre-war apartment where the joinery and the plasterwork are the point, keeping hardware off the walls matters more than it does in a new build. Lutron shades went to the windows, on the same keypads and the same scenes as the light.

Networking is Ruckus. Apartment buildings are among the most hostile Wi-Fi environments there are — dozens of neighbouring networks competing across the same channels, through masonry that was never built with radio in mind. Ruckus handles that with adaptive antennas that steer the signal toward the client rather than broadcasting equally in every direction, which is the difference between a network that works in the far bedroom and one that does not.

Everything is under Control4: television, streaming, the PlayStation, the shades and the lighting, on a single remote and a single app. The millwork was built to close over the television entirely, so the room reads as joinery until someone wants it not to.