If you have read any of our other outdoor blogs, you have heard us say that you can now replicate almost any smart home feature outdoors, and theaters are no different. The experience won’t be identical. You don’t have walls for instance, but creating a truly fantastic theater experience outdoors is possible if you know what you are doing. Luckily, as expert outdoor home theater installers we have some tips on how to get the most out the entertainment in your Hot Springs, AR home.

For anyone who has lived in a technology-enabled home, moving to a new home without much technology is almost like going back to the Stone Age. What makes matters worse is that when the technology is installed and done well, it becomes virtually invisible, meaning you may not know you miss it till you don't have it anymore.

We have talked to several team members at BRAVAS and asked them to use their experience working with an industry leading home automation company to advice homeowners and what to think about first when it comes to home technology. Here are the top 4 things to consider for your Maumelle, AR home.

Landscape lighting is certainly not uncommon in luxury homes, but most homeowners don’t grasp the full value and potential of a great landscape lighting system. The benefits to curb appeal are dramatic, but we have included three additional reasons to have your local landscape lighting company, BRAVAS, design an outdoor lighting system for your home below.

With summer quickly approaching, you might be thinking about upgrading your home’s outdoor living spaces.  In our last two blogs, we discussed outdoor TVs and outdoor shades.  In this post, we’ll tackle outdoor audio and provide some tips as you plan your alfresco oasis.

In most areas of the country, there is that perfect time of year where family activities move outdoors, and quality-of-life hits an annual high. But then the season changes and that perfect weather is replaced by more extreme temperatures. Dinners on the patio, glasses of wine by the firepit and weekends spent by the pool stop, and the family abandons the yard until the perfect weather returns.

For the longest time this was just a part of life, but outdoor motorized shades have helped us turn two and three season porches into spaces that our clients can enjoy year-round.

There is something special about watching a game outdoors on your patio or even in your garden. Some of us live in a climate where this is possible for the Superbowl, but many of us need to wait for warmer months to get outdoors.

Wherever you live and whatever you watch, there is something to consider when putting your TV outside the walls of your home. In this blog, we will review some of the issues and recommend a great TV for your outdoor upgrade – from one of our favorite brands, Seura.

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.