In our books, design is the most important aspect of any technology plan. 

Not how impressive the technology is, or how many sensors we can convince you to buy - design. 

In any practical capacity, successful design doesn’t just mean that things look good. It means they function well too.

Now before you sigh with frustration, we don’t mean the spick-and-span kind of clean. We won’t be running a finger along your coffee table and tutting when we come back for routine maintenance. 

What we mean is visually and acoustically clean. 

Commercial cinemas have seating, a screen, and black walls - that’s it. And there’s a reason why.

You’ll learn a lot when you build or renovate for the first time. 

Even if you’ve built a home or renovated before, guidelines and standards can change, and it’s impossible to remember everything you’ve ever learned about an industry you don’t work in day-in-day-out. 

That’s where the professionals come in…

So, when should you get in touch with us?

Smart lighting is automated lighting. That’s lighting that turns on and off based on what’s detected by presence and light level sensors. 

This effort-saving benefit sits at the simplest level of smart lighting pros. This simple use benefit is lamps turning on automatically when someone enters a dark room.

Home cinemas can feel quite strange when you enter them. Because they’re rooms within rooms designed to fulfil a certain purpose, the make-up of the room differs from the rest of the rooms in a home. That strange feeling we can get when we enter a home cinema has to do with sound. 

Aside from any particular brand of light or computer, our main concern for offices is the strength of their network. 

What is a network?

A network is the backbone for technology. It’s ‘for the internet’ - the infrastructure that brings the internet to your devices. That begins with how and where the internet is brought into your home (ideally a central location for even distribution across the space) and then its accessibility around your home.

Once builds or renovations are done, you don’t tend to hear from the tradespeople involved again unless something’s gone wrong.

Smart technology doesn’t work like that: it isn’t fit and forget.

But doesn’t saying that fly in the face of everything we say about automation simplifying lives? Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Earlier this month we hosted a CPD about home cinemas during a thunderstorm. Whilst we didn’t intend to deliver the presentation with sound effects, the rolling thunder throughout certainly drove home what we were trying to say about the impact of immersive cinema. 

Storytelling is at the core of good content. Whether you’re watching the latest blockbuster, keeping up with the housewives of who-knows-where, or building a town in Minecraft, you’re invested because of the story that content’s telling. 

We can’t comment on the quality of the stories you’re enjoying, but we can help you up their emotional impact with a high-quality, professionally designed home cinema. 

Wendy and Paul Lynch came to us in 2020 with their plans for a new build home in Castlederg. 

Scott met the couple at the Selfbuild Extend & Renovate Show in Belfast when Wendy was searching for a company that could consolidate all the tech she needed to control in her home into one system.

After seeing the Loxone hardware at Epitome Living’s stand, and chatting to Scott about how easy its systems are to use, Wendy was sold that Epitome Living was the right smart technology installer for her. 

We completed the Lynchs’ smart technology installation in 2022, with the addition of a home cinema alongside the building management controls we install in most projects.

The key difference between living rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, and bedrooms is that the former are social spaces, and the latter are private spaces. Social spaces consider the needs of the individual alongside the needs of whole families and guests. In private spaces, however, the needs of the individual are prioritised.

Throughout our years in business, we’ve seen gentle technology touches added to a property outside that make a huge difference to how the home looks and feels. Likewise we’ve also seen clients go all in with their outdoor technology to create gardens that are party-ready at the touch of a button.

The worst thing you can do, particularly if you’re building, is forget how impactful the outdoor space around your home is.

The kitchen: the heart of the home. 

For some, it’s a strategically thought out space with workflows considered to the nth degree. For others, the only feature that matters is the microwave.  

We started our blog series on our dream living spaces with our dream living room. This time, we turn our attention to the kitchen. 

What matters to us when we’re designing a technology plan for a kitchen is how the space is used and how it can be zoned to create the best possible experiences in each area, for each time of day. 

With the right technology in place, breakfast, lunch, and dinner can match the natural flow of the day to promote wakefulness in the morning or help you slow down and unwind in the evening. 

Traditional approaches to outdoor technology don't always work…

That’s particularly true when it comes to lighting. 

The approaches we see most often involve burying a wire or two to bring electricity to a shed, or installing cold white floodlights that turn on when someone enters your driveway. They do the job, but they aren’t exactly offering much else.

Home cinemas can’t be one-size-fits-all. It might be a cliche to say that our home cinemas are bespoke to each client we work with, but they are. Epitome Living is design-led, meaning that we take as much time to understand our clients’ lives as we do specifying products. We aren’t wed to working with the same brands for every project. Instead, we pick products based on what’s going to work best in any given space.

Epitome Living's dream smart home living room includes integrated, layered, dimmable lighting and seamlessly elegant audiovisual (AV) solutions involving TVs and speakers so the space works for the whole family.

The purpose of viewing media in a home cinema is to maintain the quality of the original content. Unlike a simple TV-on-the-wall set up, or even a TV with a sound bar, a home cinema accurately reproduces the content as it was intended to be viewed. 

There are complaints doing the rounds on the internet that TV shows and movies are becoming too dark to see, with dialogue that’s too hard to hear. The problem in this case is that the devices we watch them on haven’t kept up with the technological advances of the film and television industry.