private single-family estate with a front and back wing, staff quarters, and a roof pavilion. Lutron lighting and shading, whole-house audio and video, Control4 automation, and layered security and fire detection, run from one equipment rack across a multi-wing Ikoyi estate.
A family home in Ikoyi, built around daylight and entertaining, with an internal garden, a sun lounge, a pool terrace, a Banquet hall and a pavilion on the roof. It is also a place of work, with his and her offices, a personal assistant's office and live-in staff.
The challenge was to make light, music, shading and security easy for everyone to use, in a house where most of the main rooms are walls of glass.
We set the house up to run from a few wall keypads, a wall tablet in the main living spaces and an app on the family's phones.
Whether you are dimming the lights for dinner or opening the gate for a visitor, it takes one tap.
Music plays from the main rooms out to the garden and the roof. A visitor at the gate appears on screen in the Kitchen, and the lights and TVs stay on with backup power when the grid goes off.
The Banquet is where the family hosts. One setting brings up the lights, lowers the shades and starts music across the room, so it goes from an empty hall to a full evening without anyone adjusting anything by hand.
The Roof Pavilion is built for evenings outdoors. It has its own music, lighting and wall tablet, so when the party moves upstairs at sunset, everything can be set from up there.
Their walls are almost entirely glass, which brings in beautiful daylight and a lot of Lagos heat. We fitted motorised shades to every window and programmed them to move together, on a schedule through the day or with one press, so the rooms stay cool and comfortable without anyone drawing a curtain. When the shades are up they disappear from view, so nothing gets in the way of the garden. The two offices and the Personal Assistant's office got the same attention. Each has its own shades, lighting and music, so the working day starts with a single "morning" setting at the door.