The Manhattan Renovation
A prewar apartment with plaster worth protecting, and a full-home system that had to leave no trace of itself in any room.
A system that disappeared into a prewar apartment. Every device coordinated with the interior designer before touching a wall.
Prewar detail that could not be sacrificed for convenience.
Original plaster, original mouldings, and an interior designer with a resolved scheme. Anything we added had to arrive without a visible device count and without asking the design to make room for it.
Every position was agreed before it was cut.
Keypad locations, speaker positions, display placement, and finish selections were reviewed with the interior designer and the architect before a single wall was opened. Where a device could not disappear, we changed the approach rather than the room.
Sound with nothing to look at.
Invisible speakers behind plaster carry music through the public rooms with no grilles and no visual interruption, tuned per room so levels behave across an open prewar plan.
A network built like part of the building.
Structured cabling, segmented networks, and documented addressing replaced the accumulated ad-hoc equipment of previous decades — so reliability stopped being a monthly conversation.
Hosting in an apartment that stays a home.
Scenes for dinners and larger evenings move lighting, shades, and audio together, so the apartment shifts register in one gesture and the hosts never leave the room.
A paper trail worthy of the building.
As-built wire schedules, rack elevations, and programming documentation were handed over on completion, along with a walkthrough for the household.
Nothing in the apartment announces that a system is there. That was the entire point.