A dedicated home theater is a huge improvement over watching movies in your family room, but some theaters are simply more impressive than others. We like to refer to these truly special spaces as private cinemas. They are more than just a windowless room; they are an experience, a portal right into the movies on the screen. We are going to share a few things from our perspective as home theater designers that you can do to make your home theater a true replacement for the movie theater experience.

There is a lot of talk about human centric or healthy lighting in the residential design and technology world. When you bring the subject up, you tend to get two questions: What is it, and how much does it cost? The first of these questions is easy to answer, but the second is one of those “well it depends” answers. As residential lighting designers, we will try to examine both in the blog.

Ubiquity reported that in 1971, Albert Mehrabian published a book called  Silent Messages, in which he discussed his research on non-verbal communication among salespeople. He concluded 55% of effectiveness is body language, 38% voice and only 7% is the salesperson's actual words. Others have said the mix for most presenters is 70% what you look like, 23% what you sound like and 7% what you say.

Whichever numbers you believe, the impact is simple: your look and how you sound may be significantly more important to your influence than what you say. Add into this what Stanford University called ‘Zoom Fatigue’ and it becomes important for those of us working from our home offices to maximize those things to make us more effective on our calls.

At BRAVAS, we would recommend you focus on two things when improving your video conferencing solutions: a better camera and a better microphone.

If you think an invisible speaker sounds like an April’s Fools Day joke or a science fiction fantasy, you aren’t alone. Even inside the industry, the idea of a speaker that you truly couldn’t see felt a little too good to be true. The earliest versions worked well enough but didn’t sound nearly as good as a traditional speaker. That is no longer true about every invisible speaker, so read on to find out why the all-new Sonance invisible speakers are our product of the month.

Let’s start by explaining that, unlike in a sci-fi movie, an invisible speaker isn’t invisible until it is installed. I know, I was disappointed too. An invisible speaker is a specialized speaker designed to be installed flush with the drywall, and them textured, wallpapered, or veneered over. Instead of a speaker cone directly moving air to create sound the invisible speaker actually vibrates the wall itself, essentially turning the wall into a speaker.

During a recent Luxury Living Podcast, a discussion came up about Air Quality and how to measure it. The team suggested using an air quality monitor. At BRAVAS, our indoor air quality consultants wondered what the experience would be like to use one of these monitors for a month. The one we chose was the uHoo Indoor Air Quality Sensor – 9 in 1 Smart Air Monitor. You can find more detailed reviews on the web about uHoo, but we thought we would share some of our insights after using it for a month.

By the time you read this, we will have been living under the new normal for just over a year. For some, that means a year of lockdown in your home. If you live in a large or luxury home, then the last year has probably been kinder to you than many others. Having space to move about, rooms to work in, or just an area you can call your own is a luxury.

Of course, we hope your family has been spared the worst of COVID, and if not, no gadget will make it any easier for you. We too have family and friends affected, and we share your loss.

At BRAVAS, our mission is to design and deliver technology experiences that improve the way people live, work, and play in their homes. As we look back on this year, we have learned a lot about how people use their homes, and here are five things we have noticed about whole-home automation. 

How we listen to music has been constantly evolving since the invention of the Gramophone in 1887, but the last few decades have seen some truly huge shifts in how we enjoy music. The internet brought us a free-for-all land of pirated music that largely soured the music world on digital media. iTunes eventually provided the alternative model that allowed people to easily purchase music digitally and paved the way for digital music to become the mainstream distribution model.

While they weren’t the first streaming services, Pandora and Spotify both paved the way for the idea that you don’t have to own your music library, you can have access to most of the music available in the world as long as you don’t mind paying a low monthly fee. Streaming services have also revolutionized the way whole-home audio systems work. Read on to see what streaming services we see our clients using the most.

Most technology areas are a mixture of DIY/hobbyist, semi-professional and professional. The difference between these is typically apparent and is often signaled by price. A good example may be cameras. Assuming you want a separate camera (more than your smartphone), you can spend a lot less than $1000 as a hobbyist and get yourself a great Canon or Nikon and an excellent kit lens.  You can upgrade your camera body and lens as a semi-professional and easily spend closer to $10,000, or you can, as a professional, buy the top-of-the-line camera body and spend close to $10,000 just on that. The additional lens a professional will use can cost the same again, if not more. Of course, you can, as a DIYer, spend $25,000 on your first camera, but it’s probably not going to happen.

The same does seem to hold true for home automation companies. When considering what you are going to do in your home to make it automated, there is a significant jump between semi-professional and professional. In this blog we will review why there is a big jump and if you need to take that jump.

A common word used to describe luxury goods is “refined.” In context, it often describes things in which the smallest of details improve the ownership experience substantially. A custom-tailored suit, hand-stitched leather, or a complicated watch movement all come to mind. In a luxury home you will probably find natural stones, solid metal door hardware and high-end plumbing fixtures, but even the most expensive homes will still typically share one detail with your average starter home - cheap plastic light switches.

Lighting control has long been used to streamline the number of switches needed to control the home, removing unsightly clutter from the walls. But even those lighting control keypads, a luxury item by any standard, have been made from unattractive and cheap-feeling plastics. This is even more surprising when you consider how often you interact with your lights. In a truly luxurious space, the things you touch are one of the most important details to consider, yet we have seen more expensive materials used on gutters than on keypads.

In one of our previous blogs, we discussed the balance of sound and silence in luxury homes and the impact the combination can have on your health and well-being. Designing for healthy sound is only one aspect of creating a great sound environment. 

Sure, we can add speakers into a beautiful space, "but is it art?"  

With more clients working with interior designers and architects to create a beautifully planned space, adding an unsightly speaker could compromise a room's home audio-video design. When it comes to speakers, how things sound has generally been the most crucial aspect; but more recently, once it sounds up to a certain level, how it looks may be more important to clients. In this blog, we'll explore sound options that combine function and decoration for art and music lovers.