Parade of Homes | Spring 2025

ADVANCED RESIDENTIAL TECHNOLOGY

INTEGRATED AV WITH

BY ERIN DEBOOY

G

are involved in the early designing stages, we can ensure everything fits seamlessly. It’s very important to us that things are done purposely and not as an afterthought.” The ultimate goal is a home with all the technology that their clients expect without taking away from the beautiful design. “I always tell my clients that your lifestyle, the makeup of your family, what you do for a living and how you interact with your home are unique to you. There’s no one else on the planet who’s going to live in a home the way you do, with the exact same wants and needs and desires in a home,” Deleau says. “Everything is designed with that client in mind. In the end, when the client moves into that home and starts living in it, we want to ensure they are very happy with what they’ve chosen and what we’ve done for them.” 

sound really good.” Another frequent request is to elim- inate the need for multiple light switches in favour of a single keypad that can control all the lights in one area of the home, as well as motor- ized blinds. “That’s esthetically something that designers really like and is actually something they’re now requesting,” Deleau says. Siepman says that the team at ART has started doing a lot of educational work within the Winnipeg design community in an effort to streamline home automation and design from the very beginning of a project. “If a client is building a brand new home, we want to get involved as soon as possible during that plan- ning stage, meeting with the archi- tects and the interior designers right away so we can all come to the table and look at what the infrastructure is going to be,” Deleau says. “If we

one are the days of home automation being an after- thought and an eyesore.

Now, it’s an integral part of design. “I think when we talk about home entertainment, automation or smart control, in the past, there was always some tension between the architects and the designers of the home and the AV contractors who were trying to install systems and controls … because it never really looked pretty and always kind of messed with their vision of the architectural design,” says Bruno Deleau, sales and system design consultant with Advanced Residential Technology (ART). “There have been huge inroads made to provide products and systems that blend in with the home and make things look seamless and invisible.” Distributed audio, lighting control and motorized blinds have become increas- ingly popular, says ART manager Trevor Siepman, and so has the need to be innovative while maintaining an esthetically pleasing design. “Ten years ago, if you would have walked into someone’s home where they had speakers installed, you would see these big speakers with big grills all

over the place,” Siepman says. “Now, we’ve got a number of

different options … the most popular one being invisible speakers that you can drywall right into your ceiling, and you don’t see them. The quality has come a long way, too — they

Streamline home automation by incorporating cutting-edge AV at the design stage, like the invisible speakers shown here.

36 PARADE of HOMES SPRING 2025

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