The family wanted a peaceful home that felt rich in colour and gave everyone, young and old, room to unwind. Zene Private Theater, who have worked with this client for 16 years and for whom this is the third home, built the whole system around Control4. Every room uses the same four lighting buttons: Bright, Soft, Custom and All Off.
Custom changes to suit the room, such as a “Tea-Drinking Mode” in the tearoom or “Study Mode” in the study. The family learned them so quickly they use them without looking at the labels. Motorised curtains and blinds follow the sun’s angle through the day to protect the furniture and floors, and close at night for privacy.
The private cinema is a highlight. Zene designed and built it, with acoustic materials, acoustically transparent fabric and seating, in a layout that fixes the problems of the family’s old cinema, which had too many doors and noise from a boiler room. The ceiling and lighting take their inspiration from Mount Gongga, with a snow-capped peak and starry sky. The equipment and projector are in a separate room so the cinema stays quiet. Music plays in the gym, dance studio, karaoke area, kitchen, dining room and children’s play area. Security cameras give night-time colour footage, and a signal booster keeps phones working in the basement.
The team engineered a "Cinema Mode" that lowers a concealed projection screen while simultaneously closing ceiling-recessed, sound-insulating blackout curtains and switching the DSP to an acoustic EQ preset calibrated for the now-enclosed space, letting the room function as an open, light-filled living area by day and a sealed home theatre on demand.
The team installed 3000K fixtures to provide consistent foundational lighting across the home and built a simple four-scene control logic, Bright, Soft, Custom and All Off, tailored per room, so the family could operate any space intuitively without needing to reference the panel engravings.
The team consolidated traditional multi-switch clusters into single custom touchscreen panels colour-matched to each room's interior palette, reducing wall cutouts by roughly 80%, and camouflaged exposed equipment panels and grilles to match surrounding marble, wood veneer and painted surfaces, including precision-painted speaker grilles colour-matched to the ceiling.
The team integrated DOOYA 485-series drapery and blinds motors, including a lifting system for the living room's double-height space, through Control4 and a proprietary gateway, so treatments track the sun's angle by local astronomical time and close automatically at night.
