Control4 Smart Home & Lutron Lighting During Renovation: Jumeirah Golf Estates
This major Jumeirah Golf Estates villa renovation gave us the opportunity to design and install a comprehensive smart home from scratch. The client's priorities: centralised control throughout the home, reliable whole-home WiFi, and proper Lutron lighting with physical keypads — all installed during the build, not retrofitted.
Project Summary
Large JGE villa, major renovation. Control4 with touchscreens installed throughout. Lutron RA2 Select with 6-button keypads and inline dimmers. Professional whole-home WiFi underpinning everything.
The Brief
A clear, focused brief: centralised control, excellent lighting, reliable WiFi. No distributed audio — just these three systems done exceptionally well.
Centralised Home Control
The client wanted Control4 touchscreens in all main areas — consistent, physical control points that any family member or guest can use without opening an app.
- Control4 touchscreens
- Consistent UI across the villa
- No app required for core functions
Professional Lighting Control
Lutron RA2 with physical 6-button keypads — the professional-grade choice for villa lighting control with scene management and reliable dimming throughout every room.
- Lutron RA2 Select system
- 6-button keypads
- Inline dimmers per circuit
The System Architecture
Three integrated layers: Control4 for top-level home automation, Lutron for lighting control, and professional WiFi as the network backbone.
Control4 EA Series Controller
A Control4 EA controller running a fully programmed home automation project, accessible from touchscreens and the Control4 app, handling scenes across all connected systems.
- EA controller with local processing
- Touchscreens throughout
- Scene programming
Lutron RA2 Select
A Lutron RA2 Select hub controlling inline dimmers installed on every lighting circuit, with 6-button keypads at all main entry and activity points.
- RA2 Select main repeater
- Per-room 6-button keypads
- Inline dimmers on all circuits
Phased With the Renovation
The installation was carefully scheduled in phases aligned with the build programme.
Design & Planning
Drew the full structured cabling plan aligned with the architecture drawings, identifying every AP, keypad, and dimmer location.
First Fix Cabling
Installed all Ethernet, speaker, and control cabling while walls were open during the structural phase of the renovation.
Second Fix & Commissioning
Installed hardware, programmed the Control4 system and Lutron scenes, and conducted full user training for the client and household.
Ongoing Support
System remains under remote monitoring and managed support for long-term reliability and programming updates.
Planning a Smart Home & Lighting Renovation?
Talk to us before the walls close and design it right from the start.
Why Smart Integration During Renovation Is Critical
The single most important thing we tell clients planning a villa renovation is this: the time to plan your technology is before the walls close. Structured cabling — the Ethernet cables, speaker wires, and control wiring that every smart home system depends on — must run inside wall cavities during the construction phase. Once the walls are plastered and painted, installing cabling with the same cleanliness becomes exponentially more expensive and disruptive.
This project gave us the ideal scenario: an open-structure renovation where we could work directly alongside the main contractor, installing first-fix cabling before the plastering team arrived. Every cable route was discussed with the project manager and aligned with the architectural drawings. The result was a completely clean installation — every cable invisible, every device mounted exactly where the client intended, with no surface-run trunking or exposed wiring anywhere in the villa.
Control4: What a Professional Platform Delivers
Control4 is a professional smart home platform — fundamentally different from consumer alternatives like Apple HomeKit or Amazon Echo in architecture and reliability. The core distinction is that Control4 runs on dedicated on-site hardware (the EA controller) that processes all automation logic locally. If the internet goes down, the Control4 system continues to function — lights respond, scenes trigger, and the touchscreens work as normal. This is in stark contrast to cloud-dependent consumer platforms that lose functionality during internet outages.
For this villa, we programmed the Control4 system with a scene library tailored to the client's lifestyle. Common scenes: "Morning" gradually increases the bedroom and corridor lighting from zero on a slow ramp from 7 AM. "Movie" dims the living room to 15%, activates the AV system, and closes the automated blinds. "Leaving" sweeps the entire house to zero and sets HVAC to eco mode. Every scene is accessible from any touchscreen, the Control4 app on iOS or Android, or from individual Lutron keypads where Control4 events are triggered.
Lutron RA2 Select: The Professional Lighting Standard
Lutron invented the dimmer switch in 1961 and has spent six decades refining lighting control. Their RA2 Select system represents their professional mid-range residential platform — above entry-level wireless dimmers but below the full Lutron Homeworks QSX system used in ultra-premium estates.
The RA2 system consists of: a main repeater hub, inline Caseta Pro dimmer modules installed in the electrical junction boxes behind each lighting circuit's wall switches, and Sunnata 6-button keypads mounted at the wall plates where the previous standard switches were. The keypads offer six configurable buttons — typically programmed as four scene buttons (e.g., Full, Ambient, Reading, Off) plus a raise/lower button pair for manual dimming.
Lutron's Clear Connect RF protocol is specifically engineered to avoid interference from WiFi, Bluetooth, and other residential RF devices. This is why Lutron keypads respond in under 50ms consistently, while competitor systems built on Zigbee or Z-Wave occasionally exhibit the half-second delay that makes a lighting system feel unreliable.
Planning a Villa Renovation?
The best time to plan your technology is before the walls close. Contact us early in your renovation to design a system that works perfectly from day one.