A modern Beverly Hills home organized around a great room that opens to the pool deck through a full wall of pocketing glass. Spaces like this are demanding to engineer: the room is living room, kitchen, bar and entertaining space at once, the boundary between inside and outside disappears when the glass is open, and there is very little wall left to put anything on.
Handsome Group delivered the property as a single integrated system rather than a collection of separate products. Sonance in-ceiling speakers and subwoofers cover six independent audio zones. A Crestron audio and video matrix sends any source to any room. Lighting, climate, door locks and security all sit under the same Crestron control layer, reachable from in-wall touch screens, an iPad, handheld remotes, or remotely from anywhere.
The living room had one focal wall and two competing jobs to do. Day to day the owners wanted a large television in an open, light-filled room. For film they wanted a proper projected image. Putting both on the same wall usually means one of them is always visible and always compromising the room.
The answer was a motorized screen that drops in front of the television and pairs with a Sony projector. The television serves the room in daily use; when the screen comes down the same wall becomes a cinema, and when it retracts there is no evidence either system is there. Nothing was added to the architecture to accommodate it.
The wider challenge was the open plan. With the glass pocketed, the great room, the kitchen, the bar and the pool deck behave as one space — but they are used separately just as often. Six independently addressable Sonance zones let the house work either way: one source everywhere for entertaining, or different audio in the kitchen, the office and the primary suite at the same time. A Crestron audio and video matrix routes any source to any zone, so Apple TV, cable, Spotify and SiriusXM are all available anywhere rather than tied to the room they physically live in.
Control was consolidated deliberately. Rather than leaving the owners with separate apps for audio, lighting, thermostats, locks and alarm, everything runs through Crestron — 7" in-wall touch screens, a custom iPad interface and handheld remotes, with Crestron infiNET EX handling lighting, Crestron thermostats and sensors handling climate, and Yale smart locks and ADT integrated into the same system. Lights, temperature and doors are all reachable remotely. Ruckus wireless access points and Netgear AV switching provide the network the whole system depends on, covering the interior and the exterior grounds.
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