How an interior designer and a custom installer made a major audiovisual installation look easy.

Dean Martin spins and shoots the bad guy out of the saloon’s rafters. Everyone seated in the living room applauds. Thanks to Martin, life is looking up for John Wayne, the beleaguered sheriff in Rio Bravo.

Actually, you’re a far cry from Rio anything. You’re nestled into a luxury condo in the Four Seasons overlooking Miami and the harbor.

The Crestron keypad and Kaleidescape System DVD and music puts you at ease and in total control of your audio/visual universe. With so many movies, TV channels and music to choose from, the world is at your fingertips.

Ease of control and easy access to countless entertainment options is exactly what this family wanted for their pied-a-terre. But this gathering place is not only for themselves—it also accommodates all the CDs and DVDs they bring back from their many travels.

Luckily, the Kaleidescape gobbles up more than one disc at a time, digitizing all it ingests for future use. Loading one CD at a time would take untold hours—time that the family would rather spend convoying their Bentleys and Jags through South Beach.

The custom A/V system this entertainment-loving, CD- and-DVD-collecting family required is indeed complex. Plus the easy-to-use system operates at Bentley -like performance levels. The challenge for this project—which was headed up custom installer David Frangioni of Audio One Sound & Video Inc. in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.—was to make all the heavy gear “light” in appearance.

The custom cabinetry and built-ins, which were designed by Carola Hinojosa’s Miami firm, Hinojosa Design, house all of the stat-of-the-art Runco CW-50MCs, the Marantz SR7500s, and a Genelec HT206B speakers (Hinojosa also consulted with the homeowners on all art purchases and the wall finishes).

To maintain the condo’s light-as-air style, the speakers couldn’t look or feel massive, unwieldy or tank-like even though they play a huge, defining role in every room. Like the Duke in nearly every frame of Rio Bravo, the powerful yet subtle A/V system is the star of this home.
The cabinetry housing the condo’s elite gear had to embody the light-hearted spirit of the Miami zeitgeist. Plus it had to provide the proper ventilation for all the ensuing heating issues.

“It wasn’t that we were working with a small space,” says Frangioni. “We had so much that had to go into the footprint—and all the cable management had to be factored in as well.”

Fortunately, Frangioni had already designed an exclusive computer system to ensure every A/V detail was factored into the home’s blueprints properly.  

“We hold the hand of the project the whole way through to make sure what we have chosen fits,” he says. “From the beginning [of every project], we publish all the A/V specs in detail on a password-protected website—every piece of gear in every room, every weight, and every dimension.”

That list even includes color choices for equipment, such as almond, white or black for the Crestron keypads. This allows everyone involved in the project—from the interior designer to the general contractor or the electrician—to log on and work with Frangioni’s specifications. Even if the electrician bows out mid-project, his replacement can get up to date quickly by consulting the website to review his equipment specs.

“No one says ‘Oh, I thought we were putting a TV in that room’ halfway through the project,” Frangioni says.