On the BRAVAS Luxury Living Podcast, we were recently joined by Jimmy Paschke, Sales Manager at SurgeX Residential. We discussed many issues around getting the power systems right for your luxury smart home. You can listen to the podcast here. A couple of the ideas we discussed may be worth a deeper dive - Surge Protection and Power Conditioning.

If, like most people, you have been watching more Netflix and Amazon Prime than regular TV, you may be wondering about ‘cutting the cord.’ It seems like a good idea and could even promise to save you money, but there are risks and problems. While there are thousands of blogs covering how to get rid of your cable and satellite TV services, few explain the complexities and downsides. In this blog, we will discuss some of the pros and cons of going without regular TV service.

One of the most significant differences between a well-designed home automation system and a poorly designed one is scenes. Worse, you maybe have no scenes set up at all. In this blog, we will review what scenes are, pick the top 6 every home should have, and talk about getting them right for you. If you think we have missed some, let us know.

The new reality is that many of our meetings going forward are going to be from our laptops. While Zoom calls aren’t the same as in-person meetings, it is still important to put your best foot forward. The person on the other end of the call may not get to appreciate your minty fresh breath or fancy new shoes, but below are some ways you can look great when your meetings can’t be in person.

We are all quickly realizing that we may have to adjust to this new world we live in, not just locally, but globally. With high traffic locations such as office buildings, sports complexes, retail locations, grocery stores, casinos, and more being the riskiest, they are also crowded for a reason; most of these places are essential to live life, to break away from the everyday.

3 years ago, my husband and I completed an 18-month build of what would be considered our primary residence off Florida's southeast coast on a corner alcove with direct access to the Intracoastal Waterway. We hired a dream team of experts in the fields of custom mid-century modern building, architecture & interior design -- with an emphasis on sustainable materials throughout. Taking a nod from Architectural Digest, (as well as a few raving colleagues) we consulted with a lighting designer on how to incorporate human-centric lighting (more commonly referred by its buzzword, circadian rhythm lighting) into our primary bedroom & the kids' adjacent bedrooms -- along with our large, albeit, shared office space downstairs. 

Hopefully we have all come to terms with COVID-19. While things are starting to look better, we are not free of the virus and none of us are sure when we will be. Over the last few months, customers, partner and our own team have noticed five solution areas that are getting more questions and focus.  If these are interesting to you, we would love to show you how we can help.

Maybe a year ago, asking if you had a healthy home would have seemed to be a strange question. Outside of some specific cities or areas, few people have cared about their air and water quality. Now we get asked every day if there is any way to test, monitor, and improve the environment we live in.

On the BRAVAS Podcast­, we talked to Anthony Antolino, the Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer at Delos, about that very subject. You can watch that podcast on   or subscribe to our video podcasts here.

For many home technology installers, it’s easy to get stuck in a project-based mindset. Projects have a beginning (discovery, design, engineering); middle (procurement, staging, installation, programming); and end (calibration, training, optimization). Once the final walk-through with the client is done, and they have been taught how to use their system, they tend to think of projects as having come to an end.

For homeowners, however, this is just the beginning of the journey.

At BRAVAS, we believe that without the right technology, you can not build a truly beautiful and luxurious home. Yet, when we talk to many builders and homeowners and suggest this, they turn and run the other way. For many people “smart home” is an oxymoron like “act naturally” or “open secret.” For some, their experience with technology in their home is that it gets in the way of their day-to-day living. The promise, they say, is never paid off by the reality.

So why do so many people believe technology is more of a hindrance than a help, and how can you get the benefits without the pitfalls?