Private residence, South-East London — whole-house Control4.
Lighting, music, cinema, the front door and the cameras — brought onto one interface, and programmed around how one family actually lives.
The brief
The owners didn’t ask for a smart home. They asked for the problems to stop: five remotes on the coffee table, a doorbell nobody heard from the garden, lights that needed a lap of the house at bedtime, and Wi-Fi that died in exactly the rooms they used most. The word “Control4” came from us — the requirement from them was simply that everything should work, together, without a manual.
The engineering
The foundation went in first: Cat6A structured cabling to every television, access point and keypad position, a UniFi network with wired access points placed from the floor plan, and a dressed equipment rack in the utility room where five remotes’ worth of boxes now live out of sight.
On top of that, a Control4 CORE 5 runs the house. Lighting circuits were mapped to adaptive dimmer channels at first fix — our electricians and programmers work from the same drawings — with engraved keypads at the doors: Welcome, Cook, Film, Goodnight. Philips Hue lamps were integrated into the same scenes rather than living in a separate app. Music runs through a Triad matrix to in-ceiling speakers, so the kitchen, garden and bathrooms each get their own zone from one music library.
The media room got the full treatment: a 5.4.4 Dolby Atmos layout with speakers placed to published angles, four subwoofers positioned to smooth the room’s bass response, a Denon AVC-X3900H calibrated with Dirac Live, and one press — Film — that dims the lights, drops the blind and sets the input. The 2N intercom at the gate rings through to touchscreens, televisions and phones; UniFi Protect cameras record locally to the rack, on their own network segment, viewable from the same interface as everything else.
The outcome
One app, three keypads and a remote replaced the coffee-table pile. The doorbell is heard in the garden because it plays through the garden speakers. Bedtime is one press by the bedroom door. And when the family’s needs change, the handover pack — rack elevation, cable schedule, scene map, credentials — means the system can be extended without archaeology.
Systems installed
Address and client identity are withheld. A reference can be arranged privately on request.
Recognise the coffee-table pile?
Send a floor plan or just describe the frustrations. We’ll tell you what one interface would take.