Private houses · Near Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire

Farmhouse near Kilmarnock: from empty shell to Control4, Lutron and 7.1 surround

We wore wellies on the first visit: an empty shell on farmland just north of Kilmarnock, bare walls, rafters and roof. The client wanted a living room with surround sound and a big screen and nothing else visible, lighting that changes colour on a schedule, a rack hidden upstairs, and two more zones in the bedrooms. Lairds designed it with the architect and builder and wired it at the framing stage.

Client

Private family

Site

A renovated farmhouse north of Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire

Scope

Infrastructure design, cabling, 7.1 surround, video and audio distribution, Wi-Fi, lighting, control

Control

Control4 Core 3 with Neeo remote; Lutron RA2 lighting

The building

The farmhouse was a shell when we first saw it, and it looked as though the farm animals had moved in. The initial consultation produced the infrastructure design and layout from the client’s, the architect’s and the builder’s requirements, with drawings, schematics, equipment lists and specifications, and the installation was scheduled around the trades.

At the framing stage we ran Cat 6, SCP speaker cable and a fibre backbone, ready for the external services and the plasterboard. Because this is a farmhouse, every underfloor and in-wall cable was run in rigid conduit to protect it from rats and mice, which turned out to be particularly active during the build.

What we designed

The living room has a 7.1 surround sound system on Sonance 8-inch ceiling speakers and a Yamaha receiver, with an OLED screen and not a cable in sight. Sources are centralised in a Chief rack in a hall recess on the first floor, with high-speed connections to the ground floor and the internet, and video and audio are distributed to two further zones in the upstairs bedrooms through a Pulse-Eight Neo 4×4 video matrix with audio extraction and a 4×4 audio matrix. Everything is connected for streaming.

Ruckus Unleashed wireless and switching cover the house, with external access points front and rear, behind a Draytek router. Control4, with the Neeo remote and a Core 3 processor, runs the system, and Lutron RA2 with Philips Hue provides lighting control with colour change and scheduling. OvrC gives us remote administration and monitoring, so most support happens without a visit. See our smart home and Lutron lighting services.

The farmhouse

OLED screen and in-ceiling speakers in the East Ayrshire farmhouse

The finished living room of the farmhouse near Kilmarnock with a view over the Ayrshire countryside

What we handed over

A sharp, clean, modern house with centralised sources, surround sound, colour-changing lighting on a schedule, Wi-Fi to the garden and a system we can look after remotely, finished in time for the spring mornings and the view over the Ayrshire countryside.