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High IQs for High-End Homes
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BNH
6/1/2000
By: John Florian
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Nobody wants to live in a “dumb” house, but the homes Corey Ferrell works on are smarter than most. Much bigger, too. In fact, Farrell likens today's new mansions to small office complexes, needing central intelligence to manage a myriad of electronic systems. Designing, installing and maintaining those residential (and some commercial) systems is the expertise of Ferrell's award-winning company, Tech-Know House, in Oxford. Need a smarter house or company conference room – or want to peek inside one? Read on.
How does your firm make
a new house smarter?
The technical term for what we do is 'systems integration.' We take all the systems in high-end residences and business conference rooms, and blend them together to make the individual systems function as one cohesive unit, which the homeowner or audio/visual person in business finds more friendly to use.
For example?
These new houses - some of them going up to 30,000 square feet - are more like small office complexes, with many, many systems to operate. The people living in them don't want to be bogged down checking 20 to 30 thermostats, hundreds of zones of security and sensors, and taking care of several hundred lighting circuits. The entire system works on schedules, keyed around the client's lifestyle. It takes care of everything. Of course, if they have a home theater or audio system, when they want to control a screen or listen to music, that's a different story. But the hard-core automation of the system, people don't see. It's like having the best possible house sitter because it never takes breaks, or never invites its boyfriends or girlfriends over.
What region do you cover?
We work from New York City to Boston. There's a ton of work in Greenwich now, but also Litchfield County, the Hartford area, and New Haven certainly, going into Woodbridge. We're also doing projects on the coast, in Guilford and Lyme. There are pockets all over the place.
And those pockets are certainly deep. But can people with more modest budgets also give their new houses more IQ?
Some products have been introduced that are supposed to make their mark in the 2,000- to 5,000-square-foot markets, but we're not seeing that yet. Every so often, though, we'll do a small system in a vacation home. For instance, we've done one for a businesswomen who, when she leaves her office on Friday, wants to call up the vacation home - let's say in the winter - to warm up the house, turn on the lights and get the hot tub ready. In cases like that, the system can be very small, involving only one zone for heating, perhaps four for lighting, and a single hot tub.
And you've won an award
for your work.
Yes, the 'Best Integrated Home System' award from CEDIA - the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association - for work we did in 1998 on a 22,000-square-foot home in Greenwich. At that time, it was the largest home, and the highest dollar project we'd done. Our contract totaled almost $200,000, and it took a year to plan. But the project came off flawlessly - on schedule, within budget. At the CEDIA awards gala, when they said, 'The envelope, please,' and then announced us, we were just blown away. It was phenomenal.
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