★Residential · Estate

Luxury Home Automation · Kansas City.

An estate system is drawn, not added. IntegrateIT designs and builds whole-estate automation across the Kansas City metro from Overland Park, and joins the project on the design team rather than at the end of it: lighting, motorized shades, distributed audio, dedicated theater, security, surveillance, climate and the network underneath all of it, designed as one system. Control4 Platinum dealer, Crestron Elite Partner with an in-house Crestron programmer, Lutron Certified Installer and CEDIA member. Hundreds of homes integrated across the Kansas City metro since 2021. We work inside your architect’s document set and your builder’s schedule, conceal the work before drywall, and hand over documentation you actually own. Phone: (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

The order the subsystems get designed in

An estate system is not seven purchases that end up in one house. It is one system with seven faces, and the order it gets designed in is what decides whether it feels like one thing five years later. This is the order we use, and it is close to the reverse of the order most owners arrive with.

• 1. The network, first and always. Every other subsystem rides it. It gets designed for the device count the house will have in ten years, not the one it has at move-in, with structured cabling, segmented traffic so cameras and IoT do not sit on the family’s network, and enough access points that coverage is engineering rather than luck. A beautiful automation system on a weak network is an intermittent automation system, and that failure is indistinguishable from a broken one.
• 2. Lighting and shades. The most-touched systems in the house — dozens of interactions a day, every day, for decades — and the ones with the deepest architectural consequences: circuits, panel space, keypad locations, gang counts, shade pockets. Lutron HomeWorks goes underneath because it is the platform that holds up over that many actuations.
• 3. Audio. Zones, speaker placement and backing in the framing, amplification in the equipment room rather than in the rooms. Speaker locations are a ceiling conversation with the architect and the designer, which is why they cannot wait for the AV meeting.
• 4. Theater and media. A dedicated room is a construction project before it is an equipment list — shell, isolation, HVAC routing, sightlines — and the earliest of all the AV decisions in practice.
• 5. Security, surveillance and entry. Camera positions want power and data where the architecture wants clean soffits; doors and gates want reader locations and conduit. Both are cheap in the drawing set and awkward everywhere else.
• 6. Climate, pool, spa and irrigation. These join late in design but early in scenes: Away should drop the pool temperature and pause the sprinklers, and that only works if the equipment was chosen with integration in mind.
• 7. The control layer, last. Which platform sits on top is genuinely the final decision, because it is the one that can change later without opening a wall. Owners usually want to start here. Starting here is how houses end up with an excellent app in front of a compromised system.

Working inside the architect’s set and the builder’s schedule

The difference between an estate system that disappears into the architecture and one that gets bolted onto it is almost entirely a scheduling question. We work as a member of the design team from design development onward, so the AV scope lives in the documents the client signs rather than in a proposal that arrives afterward.

• Design development and construction documents. Keypad locations land on the reflected ceiling plan with the fixtures they control. Conduit and home runs land on the electrical set. Equipment space is coordinated with mechanical for power, cooling and access. Shade pockets get drawn at the head detail with a dimension that comes from an actual shade schedule.
• Rough-in, on the trade rhythm. We pull cable the same week as the electrician, not after. One crew, one project manager, and a cable schedule the GC can hold us to — which is what keeps low-voltage off the critical path instead of on it.
• Before drywall, the walk that saves the project. Every device location verified against the drawings while the framing is still visible: speaker backing, box heights, shade power at the right side of each opening, pull strings where a decision is still open. Almost every regret we have ever fixed later was visible on this walk.
• Trim and finish. Keypads level and in the finishes the interior designer specified, engraving text confirmed against the family’s actual vocabulary, racks built and labelled, displays and shades mounted.
• Commissioning and calibration. Scenes cut against the rooms as built, shades aligned, audio and theater calibrated, and the whole thing tuned against how the family actually moves through the house — which is not the same as how it was drawn.

How each of those relationships works in detail lives on its own page: for architects (SD through CA, and how AV scope ends up in the CD set), for builders (pre-wire spec on the rough-in schedule, fixed-price proposals, one crew and one PM), and for designers (finish palette intake, engraving and button-text coordination, sample boards for client meetings). The rough-in scope itself is documented on new-construction low-voltage.

Concealment, and what it actually requires

“You should not see any of it” is the most common brief we get on an estate, and it is achievable. It is also mostly a coordination cost rather than an equipment cost, which is why it has to be bought early.

• The equipment room, not the equipment closet. Racks want real power, real cooling, real access and enough depth to work behind. A rack squeezed into a coat closet runs hot, fails early and doubles the labor on every service visit for the life of the house.
• Speakers in the ceiling, or in the plaster. In-ceiling and in-wall for most rooms; where nothing at all may show, invisible speakers plaster over completely with no grille. Both need backing in the framing and a ceiling plan that agrees with the lighting plan — two trades competing for the same square foot of drywall is a problem best solved on paper.
• Displays that arrive without cords. Power and signal in the wall behind the panel, recess depth agreed with the millworker, and the source equipment in the rack rather than in the room.
• Shades in framed pockets. A shade disappears completely only if the pocket was framed to the right dimension, which comes from the shade schedule, which needs the fabric. That chain runs backwards from what most projects assume — the details are on the motorized shades page.
• Keypads that are meant to be seen. The one thing we argue against hiding. A keypad in the right place, engraved in plain English, in the finish the designer chose, is the whole interface for the people who live there. Rooms designed to have no visible control end up operated from phones.

Discover, Design, Build, Tune, Maintain

Five steps, the same on a 4,000 square foot remodel and a 12,000 square foot new build. The scope changes; the sequence does not.

• Discover. Site walk and listening session. We learn how you live before touching a wire — who gets up first, which door the family actually uses, whether the kitchen is the room everything happens in. Those answers write the scenes later.
• Design. A written proposal with 3D renderings, exact equipment and fixed pricing. Not an allowance, not a range that resolves itself during construction.
• Build. Our crew, not subcontractors. Wiring concealed before drywall. Daily progress photos, which on a long build is how an owner who is not on site every day still knows what happened.
• Tune. Calibration, on-site training, and full owner’s documentation. This is the step most projects short-change and the one that decides whether the system is still being adjusted in year five.
• Maintain. Every install carries a five-year workmanship warranty, the equipment carries its manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system, with proactive monitoring behind it. What ongoing ownership involves is written out on our service plans page rather than left as a surprise.

What an estate system costs

Four tiers cover the estate range. What separates them is scope and platform, not a menu: how many systems join, how large the house is, how much of the work is concealed, and how much of the logic is written for this house rather than configured.

• Control4, Premium tier — full whole-home automation: lighting zones across the main floor and primary suite plus multi-room audio, climate, shades and security integration, high-end equipment, custom carpentry, fully concealed wiring.
• Control4, Concierge tier — no compromises: Lutron HomeWorks lighting underneath, invisible audio, custom millwork, white-glove design through the whole build.
• Crestron Pro — CP4 control processor, Crestron Studio custom programming, per-room touch panels. The premium here is mostly programming hours rather than hardware.
• Crestron Estate — Crestron and the commercial-grade brands it integrates with, a dedicated equipment room, and a multi-year design and commissioning relationship.

What moves a project between tiers is explained in full on what drives the cost of Control4 and what drives the cost of Crestron. Subsystems have their own drivers — lighting by zone count, shades by shade count, theater by room — and each is covered on its own page rather than restated here. Every project starts with a no-cost site walk; the written proposal carries a fixed price for equipment, labor and timeline, not a range by email.

If the estate already has a system and the question is whether to extend it or start again, that is a different conversation with its own page — system takeover covers adopting what is there, and the platform-by-platform detail is on smart home automation.

Questions estate owners and their teams ask