For this stunning home, Perfect Integration teamed with a client who ‘d worked with them on a previous project – a CEDIA award-winning apartment in London. The homeowner – who’d been dissatisfied with previous automation installation before meeting the Perfect Integration crew – signed the firm up to handle his “forever home” in Monaco. That began a two-year development process in which the client and the integrator worked hand-in-hand to create the perfect Crestron interface and control system for Le Rocher’s residents. The result, according to the firm, is on point: “The GUI is easily customizable so that guest rooms can have limited control, but the house managers’ and clients’ touchscreens and apps have whole-house control and full alarm/security notifications.”
A Broad Scope of Work
As Perfect Integration tells us, “Throughout the design phase, the system was refined continually both in terms of the systems we were delivering in full, and those being delivered by local contractors but under our design responsibility. Our eventual scope of works was as follows:
Joint design responsibility of the Lutron HomeWorks lighting control system,
Joint design responsibility of the KNX HVAC Control system,
Joint design responsibility of the security systems including intruder alarm with perimeter protection and advanced CCTV system with remote monitoring capability,
Overall design and supply/installation responsibility of the access control system including car lift and turntable control,
Overall design and supply/installation responsibility of networks and telecoms systems, and
Overall design and supply/installation responsibility of all audio visual and integrated control systems.”
Lighting was Key
Of all the systems that Perfect Integration was tasked with creating, lighting was of paramount importance for this homeowner. A leading demand: design a completely reliable control system that the client could adjust and update himself. The Lutron system’s native smartphone app fit the bill. Perfect Integration elaborates: “Being a large property, with numerous keypads (and touchpanels), we designed the system around shared scenes, which allows the client to update a specific single scene – that can then be deployed to all the keypads and touchpanels that are linked to it.”
The lighting design fills the property with elegance and drama. For example, “The spa area has a hammam (a kind of Turkish steam bath) with color change lighting which goes red as it warms up, and the massage room has a stunning, backlit onyx wall with lighting that slowly dims during treatments.”
Climate control was another important element. The home features underfloor heating whose elements are buried under thick marble, and therefore can take extended periods of time to warm up the home. Using weather forecasting, the system can anticipate temperature swings common to Monaco in autumn and compensate accordingly.
That’s Entertainment
The audio-visual solutions in Le Rocher are expansive, with 32 zones of Crestron audio and 16 video zones. Perfect Integration has more details:”Most principal rooms have Amina invisible speakers, with a pair of B&W Diamond bookshelf speakers in the study and pre-wiring for floor-standing Meridian speakers in the reception room. Bedrooms all have end-of-bed pop-up TV mechanisms, which were sunk into the concrete floors during construction to keep the cabinet heights to a minimum.
“Being on the tip of a peninsula, with 270-degree views of the sea, outdoor dining and leisure is a number one priority for the client and his friends and family, so all external areas have discreetly installed outdoor speakers, with flush mounted speakers built into the terrace balustrade and veranda canopy, and a high output Sonance landscape system around the pool with 12 speakers and four buried subwoofers. The pool house has a bespoke mirror TV with an ornate frame, and looks quite incredible above the backlit dark onyx bar.”
The home also features a dedicated cinema that itself received accolades from CEDIA's EMEA judging panel.
Robust networking solutions and a high-tech security package round out the project, which picked up CEDIA’s Best Integrated Home awards in both the EMEA Level III and Global categories in 2019. For a complete equipment list, see their entry at the CEDIA Awards site here.
https://perfectintegration.co.uk/