Home Automation That Feels Like Architecture

The lot was stripped down to dirt in 2017, a year after design and engineering began — because on a project like this, the plan has to exist before the slab does. Most of the wiring runs the way it does in any build, through walls and attics, but Nelson Security also ran conduit under the slab to multiple key locations throughout the house, deliberately over-building capacity so more wire could be pulled later with minimal disruption. Between the basement equipment room and a key junction on the main floor, for example, four 2-inch conduit runs covered what the initial build needed; four more went in for whatever would come later. That "later" is now, and all eight runs are in use.

That discipline paid off before the family had even finished settling in. The lower level sits under a hillside with 24 inches of concrete overhead, below, and to the side — enough to swallow a cell signal whole. Once the owners moved in and found dead spots in that part of the house, the crew pulled a new run through conduit that was already in place and added a multi-zone cell repeater, without opening a single wall. The five-year runway between the first drawing and the final walkthrough in 2021 is exactly what made that possible.

Coordinating with the other trades mattered just as much as the plan itself — a house this size has a finite amount of ceiling and wall cavity, and every trade wants a piece of it. The window treatments were the sharpest example: dual shades on every window, with shade boxes that had to sit flush with the ceiling. That meant custom framing at every opening, and no two openings were quite alike — some shades sat side by side, some stacked, some were surface-mounted where a pocket wasn't an option.

Four racks in a 400-square-foot equipment room hold the network gear, AV switching, control processors, video servers, and battery backups that keep the system running. The backbone underneath the house is a fiber core running Cat6A and Cat7 out to 20 wireless access points and 10 PoE switches, feeding more than 300 network drops — over 10 miles of wire across every low-voltage system combined. On a normal day the network carries at least 175 connected devices, with the owners streaming across multiple devices at once — the kind of load that makes a properly built backbone the difference between a system that feels invisible and one that stutters.

Crestron sits at the center of daily life — 18 touch panels placed throughout the house handle lighting, shades, eight video zones and 24 audio zones of whole-home AV, camera viewing, and the Jandy pool and spa, including temperature and lighting. A video doorbell pops up on every panel with a notification tone and live two-way video. With more than 150 switches and over 300 lighting loads in the house, the owners rely on summary pages that show at a glance what's on and where, rather than walking room to room to check. The same logic runs security: all 200-plus alarm zones report to summary pages on the panels, so a door or window left open shows up immediately without a walk-through. Shades and lighting run on separate weekday, weekend, holiday, and holiday-with-guests schedules, tuned to how the family actually lives rather than a single default. Klipsch speakers cover the bedrooms, corridors, and media room, with Sonos bars in rooms that don't need full surround, and every AV zone has a programmable remote so one handset reaches every source. The media room runs a 100-inch Sony display with 9.1 surround. Outside, an outdoor TV and speakers across the grounds cover entertaining, and guests can stream straight from their phones or pull from the media server in the equipment room.

Security runs on Avigilon — more than 30 cameras and access control at multiple doors — paired with a Bosch alarm on every opening and custom scheduling that arms the system without the owners having to think about it. Additional hardening for the residents has also been implemented. A UniFi network carries Wi-Fi 7 to the edge of the property, and Grandstream video phones round out communications throughout the house.

None of it was a one-and-done install. Nelson Security has kept the house on a service contract since 2021 — firmware updates across every system, physical maintenance like cleaning and adjusting the cameras, and retuning schedules and scenes as the family's routines change. On a system this size, the way people actually live in it never quite matches the plan on day one, and the value is in catching that before it becomes a complaint.