Smart home installation in Queen's Park

The classic brief here is a five-bedroom terrace mid-renovation: open-plan kitchen and dining at the back, a loft bedroom and bathroom above, and a builder on site for several months. That is the ideal moment to first-fix cabling, because once the extension is finished the routes disappear. We plan lighting circuits, speaker positions, WiFi access points and camera runs together rather than adding each one later as an afterthought.

Lighting is usually the first thing families want under control — a single press for the whole ground floor in the evening, and something gentle for the stairs at night. In these terraces we keep the number of visible keypads low and match the plate finish across the house, because the rooms are not large and a bank of switches by every door quickly looks cluttered.

WiFi is the other constant. A long terrace with solid walls and a rear extension defeats a single router every time, so we cable two or three access points and put the equipment somewhere ventilated and out of the way. Heating zones, shading on the big rear glazing and multi-room music are then straightforward additions on the same infrastructure.