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Case Study 01
Belle Haven Waterfront Estate
An 18,400-square-foot Belle Haven waterfront engineered from trench to trim. Every discipline — automation, lighting, shading, theater, and network — specified during design development and commissioned a week before move-in.
- Location
- Belle Haven, Greenwich, CT
- Architect
- Withheld by request
- Scale
- 18,400 sq ft · 3 structures
- Year
- 2023 — 2024
- Status
- Occupied · under retainer
The brief
Deliver a home that never asks the family to manage it.
The owners had lived in a previous Belle Haven residence where every vendor's 'smart' product had failed in its own way — thermostats offline, shades out of sync, Sonos zones that dropped, cameras that required a separate app. They were weary of integrators and skeptical of our industry. They asked their architect for a firm that could be trusted to deliver a house that did not have to be operated.
The program was substantial — whole-home automation, architectural lighting on every fixture, 24 zones of motorized shading, a reference-grade screening room, and enterprise-grade networking across three structures with generator, well, and dock telemetry. The constraint was simple: it had to feel invisible.
The approach
Integration specified at schematic. Commissioned a week before move-in.
We joined the project in schematic design, at the architect's invitation. Our scope landed in the same drawing set as the mechanical and electrical disciplines, not as a separate package bolted on at trim. The architect's plaster details, the built-in joinery, and the ceiling coffer geometry were informed by our equipment locations — and vice versa.
We ran our own rough-in supervisor on site three days a week during framing and drywall. Every pocket, backing board, and conduit was photographed, logged, and verified before it disappeared into the wall. By the time we arrived for trim, every device had a home engineered for it.
Commissioning was the last week before move-in. We ran every named scene in front of the homeowners — morning, arrive, dine, evening, cinema, goodnight — and re-tuned any scene they questioned. Nothing left the punch list until they signed it.
A scene you can read
The 'Evening' moment. One button. Forty-seven device commands.
Hover any marker to see the product, the reasoning, and the engineering that placed it there.
The great room at Belle Haven at dusk — coffered ceiling with integrated cove lighting, invisible in-wall speakers, motorized shades hidden in architectural pockets, and a single engraved bronze keypad on a console.
The 'Evening' scene. The kitchen drops to 8%, the ceiling cove holds 3000K, the shades lower to 70%, and the music finds the room — in under 300 milliseconds.
Project: Belle Haven Waterfront · Architect: Withheld by request
The result
What we measured.
- < 300 ms
Scene execution from keypad press to final device response.
- 0
Visible speakers, thermostats, cameras, or control panels.
- 3
Structures federated on one network — main house, guest house, boathouse.
- < 4 hr
Mean time from homeowner-reported issue to on-site response.
- 36 mo
Continuous uptime on primary automation processor since commissioning.
- 100%
Punch-list items closed before homeowner move-in day.
Twenty-two months after move-in, the homeowners signed a second retainer that includes quarterly site visits, firmware management, and winter-season telemetry. They have not called the studio with a complaint.
“Our previous system ran our lives. This one has, remarkably, disappeared.”
Disciplines deployed
What this project required.
Automation
One intuitive interface for every system in the home — lighting, climate, security, audio, video, shades.
Read the briefLighting
Tunable, circadian-aligned lighting with recessed linear fixtures that erase shadows and elevate materials.
Read the briefShading
Whisper-quiet hidden-pocket shades that manage heat, glare, and privacy without interrupting sightlines.
Read the briefTheater
Private cinemas engineered to CEDIA RP22 standards — immersive audio, reference-grade projection, bespoke acoustic design.
Read the briefNetwork
Segmented, encrypted, high-density networks engineered for uninterrupted streaming, bulletproof security, and future IoT scale.
Read the briefThe MERIDIAN position
Your home is a target. We treat it like one.
The modern luxury home runs 200+ connected devices. Most are secured with nothing but the default password their vendor shipped. We take cybersecurity seriously in a way that residential integrators historically have not — and we do it as a permanent service, not a one-time install.
Read the networking briefZero-trust by default
Every device authenticated at layer 2, every traffic flow firewalled and logged. Four VLANs, no shared broadcast domain, explicit allow-list.
24/7 monitored SOC
An off-site security operations center watches your network every hour of every day. Anomaly detection, DNS reputation, real-person escalation in under 15 minutes.
Audited every quarter
Written compliance report — firmware status, traffic anomalies, capacity planning — reviewed with you every ninety days. Nothing drifts, nothing is assumed.
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