Private houses · Coodham, Ayrshire

Coodham, Ayrshire: invisible speakers and a hidden screen in a stately home apartment

Coodham is one of Ayrshire’s most prominent historic houses, converted into apartments. The new owner of a finished, decorated flat with curved walls and solid oak floors wanted a near-invisible, high-performance system. Lairds condemned the old wiring, used the voids, plastered speakers into the walls and hid a 75-inch screen behind a motorised canvas of the house.

Client

Private client, Coodham

Site

Coodham House, Ayrshire, between Kilmarnock, Irvine and Ayr

Scope

Infrastructure, invisible surround sound, hidden screen, video distribution, multi-room audio, Wi-Fi, lighting, control

Control

RTI XP-6 with TX2 remote and KX2 panels

The building

Coodham sits about 25 miles south-west of Glasgow, roughly equidistant from Kilmarnock, Irvine and Ayr, just off the A77. The estate is exquisite; its development has had a chequered past. The apartment had been badly cabled as an afterthought, with low-quality coax and Cat 5, no plans or schematics for routes or terminations, and a lighting control system that had never worked and had no documentation. The flat was fully finished, with solid oak floors and matching skirtings and doors, and the owner wanted the standard of system the property deserved without a mark on the finishes.

The scope was surround sound and a big screen in the lounge, a centrally managed wireless network, centralised lighting control, video distribution and multi-room audio throughout, all controlled from an app or a panel. The lounge has curved walls, and the owner wanted the least visible audio with the most performance.

What we designed

Investigation showed the rooms were framed rooms within rooms, so the voids were usable. We could not trace the existing wiring, so we condemned it and replaced it, planned a new route for the external connections and centralised everything. The building uses a lot of steel framing, which makes Wi-Fi difficult, so Ruckus Unleashed was the choice for coverage.

For the curved walls we specified Stealth Acoustics invisible speakers. We opened the walls, built frames to hold the acoustic back-boxes, fitted the speakers to the millimetre, calibrated them, and then had a conversation with the plasterer about plastering over loudspeakers. The room was painted and the speakers disappeared. The screen is a 75-inch Samsung, and to suit the architecture we built a custom frame for it, with mouldings taken from the owner’s own art collection, holding a canvas photograph of the house that motors across the screen on a Somfy drive when the power is off. Amplification is Sonance and Yamaha, video distribution is Pulse-Eight UHD, multi-room audio is Sonance, and the whole apartment and its lighting run on RTI. See our smart home service.

The apartment

The front of Coodham House, Ayrshire, converted into apartments

Curved lounge wall at Coodham opened for the invisible Stealth Acoustics speakers

75-inch screen on the curved wall of the Coodham apartment

The custom frame and canvas that hides the screen in the Coodham apartment

The canvas retracted to reveal the screen in the Coodham apartment

The old undocumented cabling found in the Coodham apartment

Equipment rack installed by Lairds in the Coodham apartment

Window of the Coodham apartment looking over the estate

What we handed over

A flat with surround sound you cannot see, a screen you cannot see until you want it, lighting that works for the first time, Wi-Fi through steel framing, and one remote. Not a mark on the oak.