Project Description
This nice Whidbey Island beachfront home was an interesting and challenging remodel for a new client that would soon become a repeat customer of Theater Design Northwest. The interesting home, built sometime in the 80’s sprawled along the beach and was top quality luxury in its day. At some time the home had sat unused and most definitely needed some serious remodeling and maintenance work to bring it up great condition again.
One of the challenging parts was the audio system; it was one of the earliest versions of high end custom AV integration I had come across on an audio video remodel job. It had some cool features like a custom hardwood rack with crafted wood faceplates for the (then) state of the art AV equipment. The weird parts were: all CRT tube TVs, robust telephone wiring but zero internet infrastructure, virtually unused gear that had aged out from just sitting unused, etc.
Step one on this project was to design a robust UniFi home wifi network with remote access and also modern video distribution infrastructure to 4K standards for TV content. The house originally had about 12 audio zones, the new client needed only 5 so we designed an excellent Bluesound streaming audio system. I had mentioned virtually unused, aged out equipment: we did repurpose some of the original Parasound amps after a trip back to our shop for testing/verification. The amps that had defective components from just sitting unused were replaced with current Parasound and Halo models.
Every old install speaker on the site had deteriorated foam surrounds from humid salt air so speaker systems were replaced with current high end speakers from MK Sound and Totem Acoustic. Many of the existing speaker cutouts were large and rectangular so we custom fabricated round speakers into nice stretched fabric rectangular designs to cover the holes. Because of the customers request to create no additional sheetrock or millwork patching from our audio video remodel work, we fabricated matching “dummy” fabric speaker inserts to disguise abandoned speaker locations.
The end result was typical for a TDNW project with powerful and simple home automation for client ease of use. And reliable, well-designed audio video systems that deliver elevated high end AV quality. Stay tuned as the next scheduled audio-video improvement for this home will be visually tasteful high end outdoor speakers for the large outdoor living spaces.
