Waters Avenue

This is the version of the job every integrator wants. We were on site from the framing stage, which meant cable could be pulled through open walls on a planned route rather than fished through finished ones, and every device position could be agreed with the electrician and the builder before anything was closed up. The photographs below run in the order the work happened, from bare studs in May to a commissioned system the following spring.

Lighting is panelised: the dimming and relay hardware sits on a backboard in a plant room and the wall devices are keypads carrying no load. The practical consequence is visible in the photograph of the terminations — every circuit arrives individually labelled, one per fixture group, so a bathroom's vanity, shower and toilet lights are three separate controllable loads rather than one. That granularity is what makes a scene look designed rather than switched, and it can only be bought at first fix.

The media room runs a projector onto a motorized screen that drops out of the ceiling and disappears again, so the room is not permanently committed to being a cinema. In-ceiling speakers and concealed cove lighting do the same job — the equipment is present and invisible until it is asked for.

Lutron shades went in throughout, and a door station intercom ties the entrance into the same system, so the door can be seen and answered from a touchscreen or a phone rather than only from the hallway. Everything — lighting, shading, audio, video, the door — is under Control4, which is the point of doing this at construction stage rather than assembling it later out of separate apps.