On the old Leonard ranch just outside Fort Worth, Texas, a cluster of model townhouses rises where cattle once grazed. Made of brick and styled as new-urbanist brownstones for the suburbs, they're stocked with the brushed-metal appliances, recessed lighting, and blond hardwood floors that have come to define the homes in a certain slice of America.
But Leonard Oaks offers more than the usual all mod cons. We're talking a 50-inch hi-def television, standard. A fully integrated, surround sound-equipped home theater, standard. Three zones of AC, standard. Most remarkable is the automation system that ties it all together: a user-friendly, ready-to-program, low-voltage, Internet-accessible, secure wireless mesh network capable of controlling everything from the sprinklers to the chandeliers. "So when you leave the house," says Joe Howell, the developer in charge of the project, "you press a button marked exit and automatically turn down the heat, turn off the TV set and the lights, and make sure the garage door is closed." Howell calls this "the sizzle." "When they walk through," he says in his soft Texas drawl, "they'll say, This is the most advanced home I have ever been in, and - my God - I can afford it."
At $450,000, a two-bedroom-plus-den Leonard Oaks sells for less than half what people have come to expect for places with full control packages. The National Association of Home Builders reports that buyers typically spend 3 percent of a house's value on built-in technology. For a $200,000 place, that's $6,000. And the remote control castle is just beginning to go mainstream: The home-automation market - an estimated $1.5 billion business today - is expected to more than double by 2008. "It's like indoor plumbing," says Howell - something new and exciting that owners eventually took for granted. "The first time they brought the outhouse indoors it was, wow, a radical departure."
To offer this kind of automation for that little money, Howell turned to Control4, a Utah startup founded in 2003 by three veterans of the industry. Their mission: to bring home automation out of the stratosphere of costly systems and high-maintenance software and into the realm of off-the-shelf consumer electronics. Already, Control4 is forcing people who sell these systems to rethink their business. Eric Lee of Chicago installs custom setups for wealthy clients. "My average ticket is $70,000," he says. Now he's doing entire buildings, not just the penthouse units. Lee's working with a developer to add Control4-driven packages to a 70-unit, eight-story high-rise going up on the North Side. Buyers can opt for plasma TVs, built-in speakers, multiple-zone audio, and color touch panels. The kicker is the price: $200,000 to $510,000. That's median-price housing in Chicago. When the developer ("a total geek, a schnoid," says Lee) saw a PowerPoint presentation on Control4's system, he threw up his hands and said, "Finally."
Will West, the CEO and cofounder of Control4, has 11 thermostats and 24 audio zones in his northern Utah mansionette. He sends his five kids to bed each night with the press of a button that powers down the lights over 15 minutes and kills any nocturnal Xbox activity. Mornings begin with soft classical music that ramps up in tone and volume to a bombastic climax with John Philip Sousa. (That's one way to wake up teenagers.)
Then there was the time the house played babysitter. "It was Fourth of July, and we wanted to watch fireworks at the neighbor's - but the baby needed to sleep," says West, sitting in his office south of Salt Lake City. "I thought, why don't we have the house listen for the baby?" He rejiggered his automation system to flash the porch lights if it detected noise in the baby's room. "Even though that might sound like irresponsible parenting, the reality is we were probably watching the baby better than if we were at home."
West is clearly a bit obsessive; he ran so much wire in his house that it compromised the structural integrity. "The contractor drilled these huge holes in all the joists," West confesses. He's also quick to admit that the automation market has been geared to "rich people building homes this year," he says. "One percent of housing is new, and less than 1 percent of that is high end."
With Control4, West plans to change that, to make home automation a reality for more than just intrepid geeks and the rich. The company is in the midst of rolling out about 30 products - from a master module to auxiliary devices for a house's window coverings, fireplace, or entertainment system - that can be retrofitted because they're wireless, powered by Linux-based software, IP-addressable, and affordable.
At the heart of it all is a media controller - a remote for the entire house - that retails for $595. West calls it a "big hairy iPod": "It manages your music, it controls your home theater and everything in your house." Any number of devices, from smart dimmers to door sensors and automated blinds and sprinklers, can be added to the network for as little as $50 per hookup, without ripping into drywall. If a device already has wireless capabilities, it can be easily added to the system, which automatically searches out compatible gadgets. The Control4 also senses what loads are on the network. "I can plug the kids' Xbox into the outlet module and later, from work, tell if the kids are home and watching TV. I can tell the system I want them to play for only 45 minutes a day, and at the 46th minute, it's over."
Control4 might be just another flashy startup in an industry where countless outfits have foundered on their own hype, but home-automation professionals are taking note because of the company's pedigree. Back in 1995, West and partner Eric Smith launched Phast, a home-automation system that was lauded for its intuitive user interface and programming. Within 12 months, the firm had captured 25 percent of the fledgling market. West and Smith sold the company in 1997, then started a venture called STSN, now the world's leading provider of wired and wireless broadband service to hotels. If you've connected to Internet in a hotel room, chances are STSN hooked you up. "There is no other environment I know of that's more demanding for plug-and-play IP," West says of hotels. "We had three minutes to get someone online or we'd lose their business." By 2003, STSN had revenue of $60 million, and West and Smith, who still have shares in the company, hired a CEO and decided to focus on Control4.
With demand for home automation on the rise, the timing couldn't be better. Consider structured wiring, the bundle of cables used for high-speed voice, video, and data transmission. The National Association of Home Builders reports that structured wiring has gone from novelty to widespread upgrade: More than half of all houses built next year - not just the upscale ones - will feature such wiring. And with Control4's wireless solution, says West, you won't have to pay a contractor and make a mess anytime you want to extend it to the next gizmo.
On one wall of Control4's offices, a red LED sign counts down to a product ship date. At the time of my visit, there are 22 tense days to go. "The engineers walk through a different entrance to avoid the sign," jokes Jim Gist, Control4's director of business development. In cubicle after cubicle, the company's 40-plus engineers are putting the finishing touches on software (much of it first coded in India) and control panels, working out the nuances of what are bound to be the automated-home issues of the 21st century. One of the thorny problems: How do you make sure the music being streamed into one room is synchronized with that in another? As you walk through rooms, you don't want the music to be even slightly out of time.
In another office, on a wall lined with outlets and dimmers, a testing machine presses a light switch on and off; the counter shows almost 2 million flicks. This seemingly simple switch embodies Control4's approach: inexpensive, standard products that blend in easily. The dimmer looks like any other light switch, easily fits into a typical junction box, and costs less than $100, one-quarter the price of most automated lighting controls. But inside its basic exterior are numerous innovations. A small switch, called an air gap, allows the user to kill the circuit in order to change bulbs; the wireless antenna is embedded in the front of the switch, rather than inside the j-box as is standard, thus increasing its range; and there's an auto-sensing circuit that detects the home's wiring standard.
The dimmer is also one of the first house-control products to use the ZigBee standard, which promises to bring a greater level of reliability and scalability to wireless devices. "ZigBee is a self-healing mesh network," explains Paul Nagel, Control4's vice president of engineering. "You don't have to have a clear transmit path back to the gateway." If a plug is pulled or a signal blocked, the network will find a new route. "Every time you add a device, the network gets stronger," Nagel says. Add another button and you have another relay point. Low-power ZigBee also has its own built-in security protocol (the 32-bit to 128-bit AES encryption with authentication found in IEEE 802.15.4). "So your neighbors can't hack your light switch," says Gist.
The power of the Control4 system is revealed in the company's "magic room," a small theaterlike space that's equipped with various DVD changers, faux fireplaces, and windows with motorized shutters. Smith is walking me through Control4's Composer program. Essentially a version of TurboTax for home automation, Composer has a simple, interview-format interface that asks what devices the user has and how they'd like to use them. Just 20 minutes after wiping out the sample house system, Smith has reprogrammed it. "Let's say you want the front bank of lights and the fireplace to come on when you open the front door," he says, typing a few commands. Smith was also able to do this from India via the Internet, but you needn't travel as far to achieve the same magic: You can control your home whether you're at work, at Starbucks, or on your Treo, stuck in traffic.
Home automation for the masses has been the next great idea for more than a decade, and the road is littered with husks of companies like eHouse and GE-Smart, whose systems were going to allow you to order pizza from your TV. In the meantime, real home automation has remained the provenance of high-end integrators, using systems like AMX and Crestron.
The Control4 systems going into the Fort Worth development and the Chicago high-rise augur the arrival of a preinstalled, deal-clinching amenity, like a Levittown for the 21st century. Where developer William Levitt's postwar Cape Cods came with black-and-white Admiral 121é2-inch TVs and the nooks in which to put them, tomorrow's subdivisions might have 50-inch plasma screen home theaters, distributed audio, and integrated control systems. In the event of a fire, the house could sound an alarm, call the fire department, turn off the HVAC to stop smoke from spreading, broadcast evacuation instructions, and even flash the front lights to guide the fire department.
Control4 banks on being the first to make these luxuries a middle-class reality. "Those of us who have been around the industry are nervous about jumping into something new," says Mike Anderson, the Dallas-based integrator in charge of the Leonard Oaks installation, "but the products they showed us are compelling." Installers who have flown to Utah to test the system have walked away impressed. Jeff Hoover, former president of the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association and head of Florida-based Audio Advisors, is equipping two of his engineers' houses with Control4 equipment so they can test it. "If it's what it's supposed to be," says Hoover, "it's an awesome opportunity. If they really deliver that product in a robust fashion at the price they told us - man, does that open up a cool market." In the mid-'90s, he adds, it was a struggle to convince even wealthy owners they needed automation. "Now there's not a $2 million home that doesn't have it," he says. "The trickle-down is going to come."
Tom Vanderbilt (tvanderbilt@nyc.rr.com) wrote about the quest to rebuild da Vinci's "impossible machine" in issue 12.11.
credit Chris Jameson
Control4és big three (from left): founders Will West, Eric Smith, and Mark Morgan.
