A complete system takeover,
on a critical timeline.

The same wall. Drag the line.

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BeforeAfter

One wall, one takeover: the inherited open racks and a generation of undocumented wiring — and the same view after Firebird's rebuild.

The situation: inherited, undocumented, and failing

The estate ran on a legacy control installation, decades old. Touch panels had faded to unreadable, zones dropped offline, and every failure was permanent, because the original programming files were nowhere to be found. WiFi that predated the streaming era limped across a property built of stone and plaster — and the wiring behind it all was a generation of undocumented additions, none of it labeled.

The plan: total infrastructure revamp, staged so the property never went dark

The scope was a complete re-work of the estate's technology infrastructure: new wiring throughout, a new enterprise network, a new control platform, and new interfaces in every room — sequenced so each system stayed live until its replacement was proven. Backbone first, then distribution, then the cutover, room by room. That sequencing is the whole trick of a critical timeline: demolition without a plan is how estates end up offline for weeks.

The backbone: an estate-grade network, rebuilt from the wire up

Every modern system rides on the network, so it came first: an enterprise gateway, six network switches, and twenty-two WiFi 7 access points — interior units engineered from the floor plan, weather-rated units covering the grounds — with complete new structured wiring behind all of it. It lands in a new 42U Strong AV cabinet with dual rack-mount UPS units and managed power, so a grid blink never takes the estate offline.

Across the property: two thousand feet of buried fiber

The outbuildings had been living on wireless repeaters — the estate equivalent of an extension cord. Firebird trenched armored, direct-burial single-mode fiber across the property: a six-strand run with 10-gigabit optics on both ends, giving the remote buildings the same enterprise network as the main house. Direct-burial Cat 6 rides the same trench for cameras and access points along the way.

The heart transplant: Crestron Home, 24 zones, 16 panels

With the backbone proven, the legacy processor stack came out. In its place: Crestron's residential 4-Series platform driving twenty-four zones of audio through streaming amplifiers — amplification, routing, and native streaming in one generation of hardware instead of the racks of separates it replaced. The crew demolished the old stack, rebuilt the rack, and re-landed every zone on the new amplifiers — every speaker wire on the property re-terminated, re-documented, and given a labeled home.

Sixteen new Crestron Home touch screens replaced the faded originals, with layouts configured room by room and the whole estate mirrored in the Crestron Home app. Climate joined the system — the thermostats that once lived beside dying panels are now scenes on glass. Lighting control runs on its own dedicated processor, keeping the lighting programming isolated, stable, and serviceable on its own schedule.

What went in: the equipment manifest

No mystery boxes — this is the hardware the estate now runs on.

Field notes: the work, as it happened

Straight off the crew's phones — protection down, runs chased, racks landed, panels dressed.

The result: delivered, documented, on schedule

The finished plant room says everything about the approach: a glass-door rack, conduit swept in clean arcs, distribution enclosures mounted plumb and labeled — infrastructure that looks engineered because it was. Twenty-four zones of music, whole-property WiFi 7 on six switches, sixteen panels that respond instantly — cut over on schedule, with the property functional throughout.

The estate is on Firebird+ remote monitoring — we see problems before the client does, and the first year is included. And unlike the system it replaced, this one leaves with its owner holding the keys: passwords, programming, and documentation, delivered.