CE Pro October 2023 - 28

CE PROFILE
Beemer Smart Home
courtesy of Ketra fixtures, and the layered
approach to Beemer Smart Home's Lutron
lighting and motorized shades control demo.
Intentionally imperceptible to the eyes,
but a magical " wow " attention grabber for
the ears, are the completely concealed
loudspeakers throughout the home, including
an entire surround-sound system in the
home theater.
That's really fun to " show off " because
Håkan, the Swedish native who has a background
in audio engineering and is a classically
trained musician, gets to let listeners try to
guess where the speakers are installed - all
are LRX Series Invisible Loudspeakers from
local vendor Stealth Acoustics (see sidebar).
Håkan and Kim Olsson gave CE Pro their
home tour this summer, and discussed its vital
role in elevating aspirations of customers
who truly can envision how implementation
of a technology-driven lifestyle can translate
to their own spaces.
If You Build It, They Will Come
The first thing Håkan Olsson does with
guests is to make them feel comfortable and
" at home " in the Beemer Smart Home environment.
He walks them over to the elegant
but not overly lavish living room, where a
slideshow has been prepared to discuss what
they are about to experience on the tour.
When we got started, Olsson had beverages
and spinach-and-artichoke dip waiting
at the table. It's a modern, stylish living
room that could be featured in a home on
HGTV. Beemer Smart Home has been in
business for almost 20 years, the past sixand-a-half
in the show home - which the
couple snatched up when during one time
on a neighborhood walk they saw it was in
the process of being built.
Talk about keeping up with the Joneses;
in this case, though, Beemer Smart Home's
aspirational major purchase was a way of
keeping up with... themselves. The move to
the new home was a whopping one block
away from their previous home, and they
got in as the framing was up and at the
studs stage.
Unfortunately, Håkan recounts, the
Beemer Smart Home enjoys demonstrating the home theater system
because it can illustrate how fun and effective lighting can enhance a
theater, and how clean a theater can be thanks to invisible speakers that
are mudded over as part of the installation process. AV and lighting can be
controlled via the Control4 automation system.
builder would not let the integrator install
the invisible speakers at that time due to
some code compliance, but that actually
turned into an ideal real-world problem that
Stealth speakers could solve. The team retrofitted
the LRX models throughout; on the
plus side, it lets Olsson tell a better story
when asked about how much labor will be
involved and whether it is costly to cut into
a finished ceiling.
" We got the keys on August 5 and August
6 me and my guys were here. They did the
walkthrough first, because it's a new house
and everything, but on August 6 it looked
like a construction site again, " he says with
a chuckle.
Kim Olsson apparently wasn't aware the
project would be starting so soon. But, hey,
that shows Beemer Smart Home's punctuality
and dedication to a customer-centric
28 | CE Pro October 2023
cepro.com
http://www.cepro.com
CE Pro October 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CE Pro October 2023
