The Technical Side of Things
For custom installer Gabriel Karlis, this installation was an invaluable learning experience. “This is a traditional type of house on the outside, but the interior is very modern, very contemporary,” he says. “And that presented new challenges because everybody does traditional. We have solutions for hiding speakers and equipment in a traditional interior, but the clean lines of contemporary styling require a totally different type of thinking. That really drove our equipment selection.”

Karlis found the Crestron control, distribution and HVAC system a crucial component in maintaining the home’s pristine aesthetic, especially in keeping the walls free of light switches and thermostats. “The fact that Crestron offers a full solution made our job so much easier,” he says.

“If you don’t use Crestron, you have to use a different manufacturer for the audio/video, lighting and HVAC. We’ve been there and done that, and it didn’t give us much control. It did not allow us to easily service the client, because if we had a problem the different manufacturers would just point at each other. With Crestron, we get solutions—not finger-pointing.”

In the media room, Karlis’ team maintained a clean look by installing a trio of Triad InWall Silver/6 LCR speakers invisibly within the same wall that houses two 1250-watt Velodyne SC-IW in-wall subwoofers and a pair of Fujitsu P50XHA58EB 50-inch Plasmavision HDTV monitors. Why two plasmas? “They wanted to watch two sporting events at a time, or put on a kids’ show and still watch sports,” Karlis says. “Or they could watch a program on one plasma, and monitor the rest of the house on the other.”

If you look closely at the top of that wall, you might notice a 110-inch retractable Stewart Filmscreen tucked away in a tiny soffit—ready to drop down and convert the media room into a stealth home theater. “Normally a screen like this is housed in a 7-by-7-inch case,” Karlis says, “and when you build the soffit, you have to build it for the screen to drop out in front of the wall unit. So you end up with a soffit that’s at least 7 inches deep.”

For this client, though, a 7-inch soffit was out of the question. “They wanted it to be no more than an inch or so deep,” Karlis says, “so we had Stewart custom-build what they call a reverse roll so that the screen drops out of the front of the case. So now the 7 inches of bulky box is hidden inside the wall, and we have an inch-and-a-half lip for the screen baton to drop down out of, an eighth of an inch from the wall.”—Dennis Burger

RESOURCES
Architect: James Paragano Architect LLC of Madison, NJ (jamesparagano.com, 973.765.0155)
Contractor: West End Construction of Mendham, NJ (973.543.8882)
Custom Installer: JD Audio & Video Design Inc. of Fort Lee, NJ (201.461.7475, jdavdesign.com)
Interior Designer: P. Smith & Co. of Ridgewood, NJ (201.670.3500)

Photographer: Scott Braman (ScottBraman.com)

“This project is a stunning combination of a dream client, a gorgeous home, and a cutting-edge design with meticulous execution.”—Gabriel Karlis, custom installer