Under wraps: a New York condo's integrated electronic command center

Custom Home, July-August, 2006 by Rebecca Day

What do you get when you convert adjacent condominiums in Manhattan's Trump Tower into a single 3,500-square-foot space? You get stunning wraparound views of the east, south, and west sides of the Big Apple from 49 floors in the sky. You also get a large, concrete structural support in the middle of the room where the wall dividing the condos used to stand.

The project's architect, Charles Rabinovitch of C.M. Rabinovitch/Architects in Riverdale, N.Y., took advantage of the pillar and made the location the focal point of the sweeping loft-like space. Of course you'd never know the concrete eyesore is there thanks to the custom-built laminate cabinet surrounding it that serves as an attractive visual barrier between the living room and the dining room on the other side.

The two-toned cabinet does more than camouflage a structural element. It also swallows a rack of state-of-the-art audio/ video gear, three loudspeakers for the front channels of a surround-sound system, and a 50-inch plasma TV to boot.

As electronics become more integrated into the contemporary lifestyle, architects and interior designers are increasingly challenged with ways to make them disappear. Flat-panel technology has eased the burden of the large-screen TV, but it hasn't solved all of the installation problems that TVs present. Even a cutting-edge plasma is too much TV for some clients, leaving architects to scramble for clever disappearing-TV tricks. Rabinovitch, for one, enjoys the challenge.

"In this project there's an interesting convergence of the technical requirements and the architectural issues," he says. "The center cabinet unit between living and dining areas adds a freestanding element, and by coincidence it's the location of a concrete structural element that had been the division between the east and west apartments," he says. "Since it was centrally located it could serve as the nerve center of the whole media system."

The media system extends beyond the plasma and its surround-sound entourage of amplifiers, speakers, and video source components to include a multi-room audio system that funnels music to eight individual zones within the space. A Lutron lighting control system not only sets lighting levels according to mood or for best viewing of the plasma TV, it also operates the motorized blinds covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Despite all the audio/video activity inside the floor-to-ceiling, 5-foot-deep divider, the electronic bling remains mostly under wraps. The plasma and its supporting speaker trio are mounted on a powered assembly that motors out of the cabinet when it's time for a big game or a movie. Then it retracts into hiding when the show's over. The choreography is directed by a Crestron home control system that manages audio, video, lighting, drapes, and the motorized plasma mount.

Much of the interior in this ultimate bachelor suite had to be convertible. The space doubles as a venue for personal and business entertaining so it always has to look its best. At the same time, the owner didn't want to skimp on the luxuries of contemporary life. He wanted to be able to view a plasma TV from the living room, dining area, and kitchen without having the home resemble the sales floor at a home theater boutique.

Rabinovitch and the electronics designers at IDS Audio/Video in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., fashioned an all-around solution. The rugged mechanism that houses the flat-panel display rotates 360 degrees, allowing the owner to position the TV toward a variety of living spaces in the high-rise home. One minute it's delivering the news to the kitchen table and later on it swivels to show 24 to the loveseat in the living room.

The owner can listen to the sound of the TV from just the front three left, center, and right speakers, or he can go all out and create a surround-sound cinema-like effect utilizing a pair of in-wall speakers mounted flush in the wall. In full-throttle mode, the system also engages the thumping bass of a stand-alone subwoofer that provides the booms and overall bottom end that anchors a movie soundtrack. The subwoofer is hidden inside the furnishing elements of the room, making it, too, invisible to the casual observer.

The bathroom boasts its own TV, a 20-inch LCD model that also swivels to meet the whims of the owner. The high-mount flat-panel can be viewed from the glass-enclosed steam shower or from the tub. Installed on a flexible mount, it had to be both reachable and at a sufficient height where it wouldn't get in the way of someone walking through the room. One last consideration, says Rabinovitch: "It had to be at a convenient viewing angle both from the tub and the shower bench."

Although the apartment was gutted to make room for an entirely new design, the contractors were faced with the constraints of existing dimensions and boundaries. When it came to electronics, those issues meant limited options for home theater needs and control interfaces. Still, they were able to accomplish everything the owner wanted to achieve thanks to some 20/20 foresight. At the wiring stage, they were able to snake electrical, data, and video cable to all the right locations, which allowed for easy integration of electronics once the walls went up. "The main thing was a lot of preplanning, integration, and coordination of the media consultants with the overall planning of the project," says Rabinovitch. "We were able to anticipate everything as much as possible in terms of location of controls and integrating technology."