Archi Tect Magazine
Country Manor
By Chris Anderson

High on a hillside, with sweeping views of the rolling horse country north of Baltimore, Md., sits a home whose grandeur and design both blend with the surrounding countryside and evoke the tradition, charm, and gentility of an English Manor. Yet under the skin of this traditional design pulses the electronic heartbeat of cutting-edge home technology ranging from home theater and whole-house audio to lighting and motorized window treatments.

At 25,000 square feet and including a guest apartment and two-story pool house, the home certainly has the bulk and space of a manor. Yet it was designed by architect Donald Radcliffe - and decorated by Marc-Michaels Interior Design of Winter Park, Fla. - to provide casual living and areas for entertaining: in short, a comfortable home as much as it is a showpiece. Central to achieving the comforts of home and providing features that matched the owner's lifestyle was the technology design provided by Starr Systems Design of Baltimore.

"There is a more widespread application of the services we typically provide because of the sheer size of the house," says Sean Weiner, president of Starr Systems. "Still, we met the objectives of the home owners who were very involved in the process and wanted to make sure that the electronics we installed were customized to the way they live."

Starr first began work on the three-year project one revision before the architect's drawings were finalized. At that meeting, Weiner knew immediately there would need to be some modifications in the design of the home theater. "The first thing I noticed was that the ceilings on the first floor are about 14 feet high," he says. "So we brought that down to just under 11 feet, then stretched the length and shrunk the width of the room so that it was 20 feet long and 15 feet wide."

The reason for the theater redesign was a matter of acoustics, Weiner notes. Acoustic studies show that rooms of particular dimensional ratios provide the best sound, as they are least likely to provide both "dead" spots or create reverberations and echoes that can effectively eliminate sounds of certain frequencies.

The second challenge in the home theater was to prevent its sound from emanating into the surrounding living space. In many home theaters this is not a particular concern. "The location of this room is unusual, since most home theaters are built either in the basement or above a garage and are well removed from the daily living spaces," says Weiner. "But this room was so important to the family that they decided to put it right in the center of the house."

To keep sound from escaping the theater into the adjacent kitchen and family room, Starr Systems built what amounted to a room within a room, using an ISO-Wall system originally designed for the recording industry by Oregon-based Acoustic Sciences Corp. The result is interior walls that absorb and dampen the sound waves before they can be transmitted through the framing to the exterior walls.

The second technology focal point - and Weiner's proudest achievement in the home - is the entertainment room. Created to provide a comfortable space for kids and adults alike, the cavernous room with a barrel ceiling of timbers and extensive stonework throughout provided a number of challenges both in equipment installation and systems programming.

The key to the installation here was video: making full use of the 60-inch plasma display. Two other televisions in the room - over the pool table area and behind the bar - provide viewing of multiple sports of games. Starr Systems enabled a "quad" view on the plasma display that allows four separate channels to be displayed simultaneously. Thus, the room can show six sports contests at the same time.

"One thing that was important to do was program the touchpad to easily allow people to use it," says Weiner. "That means if there was a big play coming up on the game in the upper right part of the screen, one touch on the touchpad would bring that up to full screen and turn the volume up. Then another touch would take it back to the quad view."

Providing robust audio to the entertainment room was also a challenge, though not the top priority. "This room needed to be aesthetically pleasing more than acoustically pleasing," Weiner notes. "But a room like this isn't so bad. High ceilings, non-parallel surfaces, and diffusive surfaces like the stone and the beams in the ceiling often lend to better acoustic properties than a big rectangular room would have." Still, there were a number of installation obstacles for the flush-mount wall and ceiling speakers. Because of the extensive use of stone within the room and wooden beams on the ceilings, usable space for speakers was at a premium.

"We were able to find space at both ends of the room for in-wall speakers and for a couple of ceiling-mount speakers above the bar area," Weiner notes. "One concern with a room this size is the loss of low-frequency bass, so to address this we installed four subwoofers."

Starr also needed to provide a continuum of sound from the room, located on the main floor, down a set of stairs to the basement which houses a full basketball court and baseball batting cage! "The room is a great achievement for us, because it has to be able to go from hosting a bunch of young boys from the owner's son's baseball team one day, to entertaining his business associates the next," Weiner says.

In all, Starr installed audio in as many as thirty rooms in the house ranging from the kids' bedrooms to outside at the pool. A third entertainment area is the family room, which includes a rear-projection TV and a relatively modest 6.1 surround-sound system. The cabinet that contains the television also serves as the rack for the home theater equipment, including three 200-disc DVD changers.

In the kitchen, small design changes were required to accommodate a touchpad controller. Originally intended as a flush-mount, in-wall unit, the controller now resides in a cabinet nook once earmarked for a small LCD television. The LCD unit is now mounted under a cabinet for easy viewing from the kitchen table.

In most rooms of the home, the electronics coexist with the overall decor and design. However, in the foyer, the dining room, and the formal living room, the interior designers from Marc-Michaels wanted to insure that the clean lines of the design would be preserved. That meant the speakers needed to be completely invisible. To accomplish this, Starr chose in-wall loudspeakers from Sound Advance that mount within wallboard. Plaster and water-soluble materials such as paint or wallpaper can be applied directly over the speaker face. The speaker then becomes a part of the wall and cannot be detected by the naked eye.

The integrated nature of the home systems technology designed by Starr was facilitated by installing a structured wiring backbone in the house. All rooms have multi-port wall plates that deliver voice, data, audio and video. In addition, Starr crews also ran extra conduit to areas of potential future system expansion to make wiring and installation easy.

A NetLinx control system is located in the basement equipment room, linking all the home's subsystems. A two-way satellite broadband system is networked throughout the house, both wired and wireless, providing high-speed Internet access to both the family and all the Internet-enabled equipment in the house. Hard-drive music storage units provide access to the family's extensive music collection, as well as to satellite-based radio stations.

Working closely with the lighting designer, the systems integrator designed a whole-house lighting control system (HomeWorks), which allows lighting "moods" to be changed with the touch of a button. The lighting keypads are programmable to control other home systems as well, such as motorized shades and the audio system.

What makes Weiner satisfied with his work is how completely the home owners use the electronics system his company designed. "What made this project interesting was the clients were very interested in the systems we were installing and they were very interested in it fitting their lifestyle," he says. "Keypads, touchpanels, and wireless remotes enable the family to control the entire home from a single location and with a few simple button presses - making a large home easy to operate.

"They put the home theater in the center of the house because they said they wanted to use it and they do. They are in there every day either to watch movies, use the karaoke we installed or playing video games. It's a system that is being used in the way it was designed."

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