Technology’s Big Test

Most families would enjoy an escape to a luxurious, secluded home overlooking the ocean, accessible only by boat, plane or helicopter. For the right price, any family can share this experience by renting one of several custom homes at the Sonora Resort on Sonora Island off the west coast of Canada.

Sonora Resort’s newest custom home, named the Sea Lion, is a 10,000-sq.-ft. luxury house completed this past spring. The site chosen for the Sea Lion sits on a wooded peninsula. The owner’s goal was to build the home without disturbing the land.
A secondary goal for this project was to provide those who live within the home with both the beauty of the resort’s natural environment but also the comfort and conveniences of the best in home technology. The technology’s big test is how easily each new group of guests can use it.

New Users Every Week

The mandate from the owner was simple: Put plenty of great technology in the house, and make it easy to use. Easier said than done, unless the technology installer, architect and builder worked together from day one to determine where the electronics would be placed and how to hide certain elements.

From the user perspective, Greg Rector, system designer/installer, London Drugs Custom Works, decided to place a few Vantage touchscreen panels in common areas where a high level of control might be needed, such as the kitchen and great room. In the theater room in the second-floor loft, a Vantage hand-held touchscreen remote control unit, also referred to as a tablet, controls the multiple systems in the space. The surround sound effects weren’t easy to create in a loft. “We were able to put rear surround speakers on some decorative posts the builder added especially for us,” Rector says.

Each of the four guest suites features a Vantage lighting control system, audio/video systems, a theater system, distributed audio, computer network and a digital phone/paging system. Each suite can tap into the whole-house audio system, or can break off for the ability to play specific music only in the suite thanks to iPod docks. However, while keeping their iPod plugged into their room’s docking station, guests playing pool in the game room can tap into their iPod and control it from the other side of the house.

“We use the Vantage products almost exclusively because they are robust, with easy-to-program software and are customizable to fit with almost any interior décor. [Their] Design Center software is easy to move through and intuitive. Vantage has taken the time to build in some complex programming that used to take us time on site to do. But with Design Center it is a one-step drag-and-drop. Vantage is good in this house because it allows the clients to have the ease of use they desire, very little wall clutter, and it allows us to troubleshoot any problems that may occur from remote locations via IP,” Rector says.

An electrical room dedicated to housing technology equipment provides central access to the brains of the house, including the Vantage software that ties all the systems and products together. “I was working on a consulting basis with the builder and architect to make sure our equipment had enough room,” Rector says. “We worked with the lighting designer to determine how many different lighting loads there’d be and how many panels and space it would require.”

A central location was chosen for the electrical room to minimize the amount of wiring through the walls, says Tim Sjostrom, president, Construction Consultants in Campbell River, Brittish Columbia. “We had never dealt with this amount of wires before. Pulling wire was definitely an issue for a few reasons: the home’s timber frame nature means the exterior walls are not needed for support. As a result, much of the exterior walls are made of glass leaving no room to run wires. Therefore, a lot of the interior walls are actually structural. It’s tricky to run wires in a structural wall, and you definitely don’t want to hit wires in those walls when you’re nailing, so yes, the wiring was a big concern. It took a lot of time, effort and coordination to do it right,” he explains.