Highbury

       Lighting control was of paramount importance in Highbury, a beautiful modern smart home nestled in the suburbs of North London. With copious amounts of natural light, thanks to the inclusion of several floor-to-ceiling windows, skylights and lightwells and motorised blinds and curtains all have an important part to play in ensuring that the property remains cool in summer and warm in winter.

Meanwhile, lighting management around the house needed to be simple enough for the whole family to use while remaining sensitive to the design of a home that ranged from light-filled open-plan spaces to entertainment spaces without natural light. As part of this, tailored lighting scenes were devised for each room to allow the various lighting fixtures to be combined in different ways to reflect the activities of the occupants.

Our design required us to integrate the following:

• 0-10v lighting circuits and Lutron lighting control
• Custom flush-mounted keypad solutions
• Whole house touchscreen control
• Lutron motorised shading and curtain track solutions
• Whole-room control with Crestron interface

       With more than thirty motorised blind and curtain tracks throughout and fifty lighting circuits both inside and out, environmental management plays a crucial role in shaping the atmosphere of the residence. In the bright, open-plan kitchen-dining area, three large independently-controlled Lutron skylight blinds provide respite from the sun’s glare. Meanwhile, a stunning 5.8m-long multi-level Lutron blind offers shade for both upper hallways simultaneously. In winter, these shades can be opened up during the day to allow the maximum amount of sunlight in, thus reducing the amount of heating required to keep the property warm.

Several rooms feature both blinds and curtains, granting privacy for the occupier while letting enough light in to see by during the day while sunlight-blocking motorised curtains keep the room dark even on the brightest of mornings.

Across the house, lighting control is provided using custom-engraved Lutron keypads which have been configured to be both easy to use and able to control lighting and shades from the same location. These have been flush-mounted using a bespoke mounting solution with bespoke faceplates developed in-house and held in place using high-quality Italian plaster.

The Lutron lighting and shading system has also been integrated with the whole-house Crestron interface, which allows occupants to manage the property from their phones or iPads, as well as from Crestron touchscreen panels embedded into the walls in certain communal areas. Additionally, occupancy dependent lighting in the bathrooms and an ‘all-house-off’ button by the front door ensures that energy isn’t wasted by lights being left on when no one is present.

       While ensuring that the whole family and any guests can quickly and easily understand how to operate the home’s lighting system was a fundamental requirement, the homeowners were unsure about the presence of bulky keypads all over the property. Andrew Lucas proposed a bespoke flush-mounted keypad solution with custom engraving and a variety of faceplates personalised to each room, which would either match or complement the other materials being used.

The keypad control interfaces were kept deliberately simple for this reason, although more complex management of the system is possible through the custom Crestron interface, including the ability to tweak the customised scenes further to create the perfect ambience.

Due to the open-plan nature of the property, several light sources and shades have been added to more than one control point for the convenience of the occupants. The design team worked closely with the homeowners to ensure that the system compliments their everyday lives, including making sure that the lighting scenes required for each area were programmed to be triggered using a single button on a nearby user interface (e.g. the keypads for the kitchen/dining space include scenes suitable for breakfast, preparing dinner, and for relaxing in the evening).