User friendly: a high-tech home without a high-tech feel

Custom Home, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Rebecca Day

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 touchpanel, 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 HomeDestinations 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 didn'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 wholehouse lighting control. Lighting design is another. Designer Miho Mizukami Schoettker, owner of Akali Lighting Design in Scottsdale, Ariz., provided the lighting choreography for HomeDestinations. 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.