WiFi, Firewalla, Sonos Audio & Lutron Lighting: Mirador, Arabian Ranches

WiFi Design for a Family Renovation

The Mirador villa had an existing WiFi system that had deteriorated over years of use and had never been properly planned. The renovation was the natural point to strip it out and start fresh. We designed the new enterprise WiFi system to blanket the entire villa — interior living spaces, the study, bedrooms, and the garden — with properly placed access points on full wired backhaul.

Garden coverage was a specific client requirement. Outdoor entertainment areas and the pool terrace needed reliable connectivity for streaming music and video calls. We ran a shielded outdoor-rated Cat6 cable to a dedicated outdoor-rated enterprise access point mounted at the garden wall — providing consistent coverage across the outdoor living area on the same network SSID as the house.

Firewalla Gold: Family Internet Control Done Properly

The client had children of different ages in the house and wanted meaningful control over internet access — not just content filtering, but genuine schedule-based control per device. Standard ISP routers offer rudimentary parental controls (categories of blocked sites) that are trivially bypassed by any teenager with a VPN. The client needed something more robust.

Firewalla Gold is a network security and parental control device that sits inline at the network gateway — between the ISP router and the home network — and sees every device's internet traffic. This "man in the middle" position gives it capabilities that ISP routers simply cannot replicate. Per-device rules can be set to: block specific categories on specific devices during specific hours, set daily internet usage limits that pause automatically when exceeded, receive alerts when a new device joins the network, block VPN services specifically (preventing teenagers from bypassing the controls), and monitor which apps and websites each device is using.

For this family, we configured Firewalla with distinct profiles for the adults' devices (unrestricted), the children's school devices (educational content allowed, social media and gaming blocked during homework hours), and guest devices (bandwidth limited, social media allowed, gaming blocked). The parents manage this from the Firewalla app and can make real-time adjustments — useful when a child has completed homework early and wants extended game time.

Sonos + Bowers & Wilkins: Architectural Audio Done Well

Bowers & Wilkins is a British heritage audio brand — the manufacturer of choice for Abbey Road Studios' monitoring equipment and the official audio partner of the McLaren Formula 1 team. Their CCM (Custom Ceiling Mount) speaker range brings that engineering pedigree to architectural installations, delivering genuinely high-fidelity audio from ceiling-mounted speakers in a way that many competing architectural brands cannot match.

Paired with Sonos Amps, each zone becomes independently controllable via the Sonos app — supporting AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, and internet radio simultaneously. The family can play different music in different rooms at the same time, or group all rooms to the same source for parties, without any technical complexity. Volume balance, source selection, and grouping are all handled by the Sonos app — available on any iOS or Android device in the family.

Lutron RA2 Select Wireless: Lighting Without Rewiring

The lighting control specification for this project used Lutron RA2 Select — Lutron's professional wireless lighting control platform. The distinction from a full wired Lutron system is important for this renovation context: RA2 Select uses a hybrid approach where the dimmer modules are installed inline in the existing wiring at each light fixture's junction box, but the keypads that control them are wireless Pico devices that don't require permanent electrical cabling.

This allowed us to position Lutron Pico wireless keypads at locations that made ergonomic sense for the family — the head of the main staircase, both sides of the master bedroom entrance, the kitchen island — without needing to run new switching cables to those positions. The Pico keypads use very-long-life CR2032 batteries (12+ months typical per battery) and are mounted with a clean standard face plate matching the villa's electrical socket design.

The Lutron RA2 hub integrates with the home network, allowing scene control from the Lutron app as well as via physical keypads. Each button on the Pico keypad is programmed to a specific scene: Full brightness, a preset Ambient level, a low Night mode, and Off. Walking into a room and pressing "Ambient" delivers a perfectly balanced, repeatable lighting level every time — without any of the variability of manually adjusting a standard dimmer.