By webadmin

March 12, 2021

Crestron home automation in a Buckinghamshire house: the entrance hall, with a curved marble staircase, an iron balustrade and a tall crystal chandelier

Crestron home automation in a Buckinghamshire house is at its best when you cannot see it. The photos from this one, taken when the rooms were finished in March 2021, show a marble entrance hall and a TV by the garden doors, while everything that runs them sits in one rack, wired and dressed so that every cable can be followed.

The rooms

The entrance hall has a curved marble staircase with an iron balustrade and a timber handrail, a tall crystal chandelier dropping through the stairwell, white columns and a round table under the chandelier. Round mirrors hang above a long console table on one wall. In another room, a TV is mounted on the wall beside glazed doors that open onto the terrace and the garden.

What is in the rack

At the front, a Crestron control processor sits above a Cisco SG350-28P, a 28 port gigabit PoE managed switch, with a brush strip below it for the patch leads. Round the back the rack also holds a Sky box, a Sonos unit, a Crestron audio unit with line and room outputs, and an Anthem MRX 720 AV receiver.

Why the cables are grouped by colour

Behind the rack the cables run in colour groups, orange, yellow, blue and pink, and each bundle is held with hook and loop straps rather than tight plastic ties. Grouping by colour makes it easy to see what goes where, and straps can be opened and closed again when something is added later.

Planning Crestron home automation in Buckinghamshire

Decide early where the rack will live: it needs air, good power and a route for every cable in the house. Plan the network at the same time, because the control processor, the touch panels and the audio all depend on a good switch, and leave space in the rack for what you may add later. Crestron's own pages on Crestron Home describe its current platform for houses.

Our home automation in Buckinghamshire, multi room audio, Wi-Fi and Crestron pages explain the options, and our survey and design page shows how we plan a house like this one.