Ask a focus group of wealthy, middle-aged, suburban women to create a wish list for the perfect home, and you’re sure to get some interesting ideas. That’s what the editors of BUILDER, our sister publication at Hanley-Wood, LLC, did to develop the plan of its 2003 show home, HomeDestinations, at Southern Highlands on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Designed by Scheurer Architects of Newport Beach, Calif., and built by Las Vegas-based Christopher Homes, the 10,000-square-foot villa is the vanguard in luxury home design. And nowhere is that more evident than in the electronics threaded throughout the residence.
“State of the art” is how Greg Simmons, vice president and co-owner of Eagle Sentry, Las Vegas, describes the vast but largely concealed electronics array. “The system gives very good but simple control of all the low-voltage systems in the house,” he says. “We can turn on the fireplaces from any touch-panel, turn on the audio/video system, control HVAC and lighting…. And from the same panels, homeowners have full control of security—both perimeter and surveillance.”
Eagle Sentry designs and installs the full gamut of residential electronic subsystems from central vacuum systems to automated home theaters. Despite the show home nature of the project, Eagle Sentry’s assignment for HomeDestina-tions wasn’t unlike a typical job for the high-end installation company. Upscale homeowners want all the cool, trick features provided by technology but they don’t want to see that it’s there.
“This home was designed by a focus group of women,” says Simmons. “They wanted the house to be high-tech, but they did-n’t want to see or feel the high-tech portion. They wanted to be able to entertain 300 people yet have it feel like a smaller, livable house.”
Simmons tapped SpeakerCraft in-wall loudspeakers for the job of music delivery because the speakers’ pivoting tweeters enable installers to aim the sound to the appropriate location in a room. “The flush-mount speakers let us take away the bulky floorstanding speakers, and we can paint the grilles to match the room,” he says. Even with 32 zones of background music throughout the house and two full 7.1-channel home theater systems, “all of it virtually disappears,” he says.
HomeDestinations was also the first public showcase for Lutron’s wireless HomeWorks technology, HomeServe. HomeServe brings the full capability of a HomeWorks lighting control system to applications where pre-wiring for a hard-wired lighting control system isn’t possible. The initial budget for HomeDestination called for all the primary areas and the exteriors of the home to be hard-wired for HomeWorks. Secondary rooms were outfitted with Lutron Diva-style dimmer switches that matched the appearance of the other Lutron dimmer switches but weren’t hard-wired to the Lutron controller. Diva switches can be upgraded to become part of HomeWorks, which turned out to be handy when Lutron introduced wireless HomeServe technology just before the home was finished. Thanks to wireless integration, roughly 20 more lighting circuits became programmable for use in lighting scenes and pathways.
“That’s what happens in the real world,” says Roger Stamm, marketing manager for residential systems at Lutron. In fact, Stamm says, fewer than 20 percent of homes that install HomeWorks wire every room for lighting control because of cost. “There are almost always some lights—small bathrooms, walk-in closets, guest rooms, pantries—where homeowners decide they don’t need it,” he says. Once homeowners have lived with a lighting system and become accustomed to the whole-house aspect of control, he says, they want secondary lights to fade out too when they hit an All Out button to darken the house at midnight. “The new wireless products let you upgrade to do that any time in the future.”
Lutron prescribed two of its Grafik Eye systems for lighting control in the main theater room. Grafik Eye is a self-contained lighting system designed for spaces where homeowners might want to change the lighting scenes themselves without contacting the designer or installer for programming changes. “You can make changes to the scenes for that room without having to take out a laptop,” Stamm says.
Convenience is one aspect of whole-house lighting control. Lighting design is another. Designer Miho Mizukami Schoettker, owner of Akali Lighting Design in Scottsdale, Ariz., provided the lighting choreography for HomeDestina-tions. For Schoettker, lighting design is as much about homeowners showcasing their artwork and furnishings as it is about the convenience of lighting scenes. “These days homeowners have artwork, sculpture, and furniture pieces for display,” she says. “I want to help create a home environment that accents these pieces and provides almost a museum feel but in a residential setting.”
Schoettker’s lighting design balances the latest technology and aesthetics. “Home design is only as good as the lighting,” she says. “I use very high-tech lighting but it always has a homey look.” Schoettker’s philosophy: Homeowners shouldn’t have to even think about lighting.
Her typical Vacation Mode, for example, learns the light habits of homeowners and repeats them when they’re out of town to give the home a lived-in look. And once or twice a day all lights go off so homeowners don’t have to think about turning off lights across the house. “We don’t use 24-hour timers anymore,” she says. Instead, an astronomical clock controls the landscape lighting to come on every day at, say, 15 minutes before sunset and then off again at sunrise.
Simmons integrated HomeWorks into the whole-house Crestron control system, and Schoettker sees that type of integration as the future of lighting control. “The homeowner should have good subsystems—air conditioning, phone, and pool control, for example—and they should have access to those subsystems through some kind of control system,” she says. But she’s a pragmatist too. “If they want to control systems from the touchpanel, I usually suggest that they have access to subsystems in another way just in case something goes wrong.”
Video is another essential aspect of today’s luxury home, and flat-panel plasma TVs are changing the landscape of multi-room video, giving them entry into spaces where they weren’t welcome before. A pair of plasma TVs in the wellness center provides distraction from cardio work as well as post-workout entertainment in the sauna. A Samsung 50-inch plasma in HomeDestinations slips into a cabinet above the fireplace in the master bedroom when not in use. The TV is light enough to mount on an articulating arm that can direct the display to different viewing spots in the room.
The women who designed the Vegas home didn’t want to devote square footage to a dedicated home theater. Instead, they wanted the theater to double as a “club” room when not being used for entertaining. The small and light DWIN DLP projector was a good fit, says Simmons, because it could mount easily onto a scissor lift that motors the projector into the ceiling. The lift compartment is covered with the same fabric as the ceiling, helping to preserve the stealth concept.
Centralized control was key to the smooth operation of all subsystems within the estate. Designed as a family home, it is separated into a kids’ side and an adults’ side with common areas—the great room and kitchen—in between. With children sometimes several thousand feet away from adults, a closed-circuit camera system was a must-have addition for the security system. “It’s nice to have control throughout,” Simmons says.
The security system is operated through the Crestron control network, meaning that the entire security system can be turned on or off, or modified, from any of seven touchscreen locations in the house. “Instead of having volume controls, distribution keypads, and security keypads, you just have one panel,” says Simmons. “It’s clean and accessible. The homeowners have complete visual control of the entire security system from the bed.” That includes all video cameras, both exterior and in children’s rooms, which scroll through in slide show fashion when homeowners tap the security button. The same touch-panels also replace thermostats, audio system, and fireplace controls.
Room-to-room paging is also a must in a house of this size, and Simmons dialed in a Panasonic digital phone system for the job. “You can page children for dinner by picking up the phone and dialing their extensions,” he says. The multi-line phone system brings the capabilities of an office phone system to the home where multiple lines are de rigueur. You can also answer the front door from any room using a phone to buzz guests in through an entry gate. “The technology has come down in price to a point where it’s affordable for the home,” Simmons says. “You’re paying the price of an intercom system but with a lot more functionality.”
Eagle Sentry had a supersized canvas to work with in creating this hidden high-tech masterpiece. But “even someone with the smallest home can create a really nice electronic environment,” he notes. “Some of most expensive systems we’ve done were in houses that weren’t so large.” The important thing, he says, is to make it “high tech but livable.”—Rebecca Day specializes in writing about home electronics. She can be reached at rebecca362@aol.com.
