Crestron Custom Smart Home Systems for the Most Demanding Projects

Bespoke Crestron Programming, Built From Scratch for Your Home

Where Crestron Home is the right specification for most luxury residential projects, Crestron Custom — fully bespoke Crestron programming — is the right specification when the project goes beyond what a configurable platform can accommodate. The most ambitious installations we have delivered: a Dubai estate running eight Crestron processors controlling 72 audio zones, 32 video zones and over 400 lighting channels across two villas and extensive grounds. An IMAX Enhanced cinema in Dubai, a 34-channel surround system in Ghana, a 10-zone Steinway Lyngdorf system across a villa in Rome. These are Crestron Custom projects — built from scratch, programmed bespoke, and incapable of existing as anything other than what they are.

Custom Controls have been certified Crestron dealers and five-time Crestron Integration Award winners since 1998. We are a Crestron Dealer of Distinction, and we have designed, programmed and installed Crestron Custom systems at a scale and complexity that most Crestron dealers will never encounter.

Crestron Custom is not simply an upgrade from Crestron Home but a different way of working. Instead of configuring a standard platform, we write the programme, design the interface and specify the hardware around a single property and a single household, so the finished system has no features it does not need and no limits it should not have.

When Crestron Custom Is the Right Specification

The decision between Crestron Home and Crestron Custom is not about budget — it is about scope. Crestron Home is a powerful, capable platform that handles the majority of luxury residential projects with exceptional results. Crestron Custom is specified when the project genuinely exceeds those boundaries.

We typically recommend Crestron Custom for properties with more than five separate buildings to manage from a single system, installations requiring deeply custom user interfaces built around a client’s specific workflow, complex third-party integrations outside Crestron Home’s supported device ecosystem, and projects where the programming logic itself — not just the configuration — needs to be written from scratch. If you are not sure which applies to your project, the honest answer is usually Crestron Home — and we will tell you that clearly.

The deciding factors are not always the obvious ones. A staffed estate or a property run by a household manager may need different views and permissions for family, guests and staff, and a project with unusual equipment, such as specialist plant, architectural lighting from several manufacturers or commercial-grade AV, may need integrations written specifically for it. We assess the brief against these questions before recommending either platform, and we put the recommendation in writing.

What Crestron Custom Integrates

Lighting and shading. For the most demanding projects, Crestron pairs with Lutron Homeworks QSX — the world’s finest residential lighting control system. Lutron manages every circuit and motorised blind with its characteristic precision; Crestron provides the unified interface across every other system in the property. Read more about Crestron lighting and shading →

Audio video distribution. Crestron NVX distributes 4K HDR video from any source to any display across the property — over a standard IP network, with no signal loss and virtually zero latency. Crestron NAX delivers multi-room audio at any scale, with each zone independently controllable. Read more about Crestron AV distribution →

Climate and HVAC. Underfloor heating, zone-by-zone air conditioning, whole-house ventilation, heat recovery systems and swimming pool temperature — all integrated within the Crestron programme. Read more about Crestron climate integration →

Security and access. Gate control, video doorbell, CCTV, alarm panels, smart locks and access control — all accessible from the Crestron interface and from the Crestron app anywhere in the world. When the perimeter alarm activates, the exterior lighting floods simultaneously. When the family leaves, a single departure scene arms the alarm, closes every blind and confirms the building is secure.

Home cinema. Every Crestron Custom installation we deliver with a cinema room integrates the cinema completely within the smart home system — projector, screen, processor, Trinnov or Anthem calibration, lighting, blinds and climate all responding to a single scene trigger. Read more about home cinema installation →

Everything else. Beyond these headline systems, Crestron Custom integrates the services that are normally managed separately: swimming pool plant, irrigation, gates and garage doors, energy monitoring and renewable energy, intercom and any third-party equipment that exposes a network or serial interface. Where a device has no ready-made driver, we write one rather than leaving it outside the system.

Five-Time Crestron Integration Award Winners — Unique in EMEA

Five Crestron Integration Awards, won in five consecutive years. No other installer in EMEA has done it. The awards are judged by Crestron itself against entries from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Our award-winning entries were a Dubai estate with eight processors and 72 audio zones, a whole-home Derby lighting scheme built entirely on Crestron’s own fittings, two wins for Best High Rise in Europe at Claridge’s and the Beetham Tower, and the first Crestron Digital Media installation in the UK, on Baker Street. Open any award below to see the project behind it.

Best International Project — A Whole-Estate Crestron Installation, Dubai

Our most celebrated Crestron case study — and the project that won us the Crestron Integration Award for Best International Project — is a complete Crestron system spanning two large villas, extensive gardens, a swimming pool, a basketball court, a lake and a stream on a private estate in Dubai. Eight Crestron processors provide integrated control throughout, distributing audio to 72 zones, video to 32 zones and managing well over 400 lighting channels across both villas and the grounds. Five surround sound zones, five Kaleidescape movie servers, four Apple TVs, 24 audio sources and a full Crestron Sonnex audio distribution system serve the family villa, the guest villa, staff areas, offices and classrooms simultaneously.

The scope is perhaps best illustrated by its details: the basketball court has four cabinet speakers mounted on the floodlights with two sunken subwoofers; the garden fire pits are Crestron-controlled; the gym features Artcoustic speakers enhanced by subwoofers; and the master bedroom suite houses a bespoke Stax headphone system with a valve amplifier and DaVinci DAC for private listening. The dedicated home cinema room in the family villa seats eight in Cineak chairs with backlit Onyx tables, with a 3.5m screen and 17 channels of surround sound — one of the most comprehensive Crestron installations ever delivered in the residential market. Read the full case study →

Best Lighting Control & Design — A Whole-Home Lighting Installation, Derby

Where the Dubai estate shows what Crestron can do at maximum scale, this new-build home in the Derby countryside shows what it can do with lighting alone, done properly — the project that won us the Crestron Integration Award for Best Lighting Control & Design, and the first installation in the UK to use Crestron’s own dimmable LED fittings end-to-end, with nothing else involved in the lighting. Over 350 fittings across 200+ channels — each drawing roughly 18 watts while matching the output of a 50-watt halogen downlight — are managed through six distributed lighting racks for clean cabling and full redundancy. The client calculated that the entire house now uses the same lighting energy previously used by just the kitchen and dining room alone. Scenes, scheduling and remote access are available from the wall touchpanels, more than 50 keypads or an iPad, and every keypad is custom-engraved so each button says what it does.

Lighting sits alongside 24 audio zones and 16 video zones over Crestron Digital Media, full heating and air conditioning control, gate intercom distributed via touchpanels throughout the property, and a complete monitored security and CCTV system with automatic camera-follow logic — every part of it native Crestron, controlled from the same wall touchpanels and iPad interfaces used for everything else in the home. Read the full case study →

Best High Rise in Europe — Claridge’s Hotel Penthouses, Mayfair

Working inside the listed Claridge’s Hotel, we installed Crestron-controlled Loewe multimedia systems in two penthouse apartments of three rooms each — the project that won the Crestron Integration Award for Best High Rise in Europe. The interiors are listed, so no new cable routes could be created and nothing could be chased, drilled or rewired. Every decision about equipment and control started with the building rather than the product catalogue.

Every room has a Loewe LED TV and Blu-ray player. In the living rooms, 46-inch Loewe TVs are paired with upgraded audio: the Individual Sound Projector in one apartment and stand-mounted stereo speakers in the other, both supported by subwoofers. Wireless control removed the need for wall-mounted keypads or new wiring to each control position, which is what made a full Crestron system possible in rooms that could not be physically altered.

The design centred on the Crestron TPS-6X wireless touchpanel, which uses RF rather than WiFi for instant response and freedom from interference by neighbouring wireless networks. Each panel carries the Claridge’s crest in a bespoke finish, and guests reach the Loewe LED TVs, Blu-ray, Sky HD and hotel TV from one interface that had to be intuitive for guests of any nationality with no instruction. Read the full case study →

Most Innovative Control — The First Crestron Digital Media Installation in the UK, Baker Street

This modern townhouse near Regent’s Park was the first Crestron Digital Media installation in the UK, and won the pan-European 2010 Crestron Integration Award for Most Innovative Control Solution. It also became an official Crestron case study. HD audio and video from Sky HD, ArabSat, Apple TV and a Kaleidescape server reach eight TVs over Cat5e cable, with an audio matrix feeding ceiling speakers in each room, including DAB radio.

Centralising the sources means one Sky HD, ArabSat, Apple TV and Kaleidescape installation serves the whole house rather than a box beside every television. The Kaleidescape server holds the client’s film collection for instant access in any room, and the CCTV cameras appear as just another source on any screen. The interface was programmed from scratch around the property and the people living in it, with weather feeds and local times for each of the client’s international home locations embedded on the touchpanel home page.

Lighting, heating, Hitachi air conditioning and an Axis IP CCTV system run from the same Crestron interface, on a mix of wired TPS-6L and wireless TPS-6X touchpanels, with iPhone control from anywhere in the world, including switching on the underfloor heating during the transfer from the airport. The Axis cameras are viewable from the client’s laptop or full-screen on a touchpanel at home, with a large storage server keeping all footage available for analysis. The interface is so intuitive that the client turned down training, and it is used regularly by non-English-speaking staff. Read the full case study →

Best High Rise in Europe — Beetham Tower Penthouse, Manchester

The top two floors of the 168.87m Beetham Tower, the highest residential living space in Europe at the time of installation, won us the 2009 Crestron Integration Award for Best High Rise in Europe and became an official Crestron Digital Media case study. The biggest challenge was not distributing audio and video but controlling the building management systems: underfloor heating, ventilation, swimming pool temperature and the irrigation for a 4,000 square foot rooftop olive grove, all from Crestron 6-inch touchpanels.

Bringing these systems under one controller means the client never deals with a separate thermostat, pool controller or irrigation timer. Temperature setpoints are adjusted room by room with a simple scroll and tap on the touchpanels, and the heating, ventilation, pool and garden sit in the same interface as the audio, video, lighting and security, so the whole penthouse is run the same way.

Alongside the environment sit eight audio zones and four video zones with a Kaleidescape server that stores the client’s DVD and CD collection so several different films or albums can play at once in different zones, and an FM tuner that is particularly popular in the his-and-hers bathrooms. More than 60 lighting channels and 25 keypads give direct scene recall around the apartment, and CCTV, including the private lift lobby, records on a rolling basis alongside a monitored alarm that notifies the concierge and the client, all in one interface. Read the full case study →

Alongside the awards, we are a Crestron Dealer of Distinction, Crestron’s higher dealer level, and we have been certified Crestron dealers since 1998, the year Crestron was establishing itself as the dominant residential automation platform in the UK. For over two decades we have remained continuously active in the Crestron ecosystem, installing hundreds of systems across every generation of Crestron hardware and software.

Our Approach — Pre-Build, Pre-Programme, Ship to Site

Every Crestron Custom system we build is pre-built, pre-programmed and tested at our UK workshop before it arrives on site. The rack is wired, labelled, loaded with the programme and verified against the design documentation before a single cable is connected on site. Commissioning on site involves connecting the rack to the building’s infrastructure, walking through the programme with the client’s preferences and refining scenes in the finished space. It does not involve building a system from components in a plant room on site — which is the single most common source of delay and cost overrun on complex Crestron projects.

Pre-building also means problems are found in the workshop rather than in a half-finished house, where tracing a programming fault or a faulty component costs far more. On site the work is connecting the rack, refining scenes in the finished space and training the household, and the documentation is handed over complete.

This methodology is only possible because of 25 years of Crestron installation experience. It requires knowing what the programme needs to do before writing it, and knowing how the hardware will behave in the finished installation before it arrives. We have been doing both since 1998. We also take over existing Crestron systems installed by other companies →

Crestron Custom FAQs

• What is the difference between Crestron Home and Crestron Custom?
  Crestron Home is a powerful, capable platform that handles the majority of luxury residential projects. Crestron Custom is fully bespoke Crestron programming, specified when a project goes beyond what a configurable platform can accommodate. Every scene, interface screen and integration is written from scratch for the property.
• When is Crestron Custom the right choice?
  We typically recommend it for properties with more than five separate buildings to manage from a single system, installations needing deeply custom user interfaces, complex third-party integrations outside Crestron Home’s supported devices, and projects where the programming logic itself needs to be written from scratch. If you are not sure, the answer is usually Crestron Home, and we will tell you so.
• What can a Crestron Custom system control?
  Lighting and shading, audio and video distribution using Crestron NVX and NAX, climate and HVAC, security, gates, CCTV and access control, and the home cinema, all from one interface and the Crestron app.
• Does Crestron work with Lutron lighting?
  Yes. For the most demanding projects Crestron pairs with Lutron HomeWorks QSX. Lutron manages every circuit and motorised blind, and Crestron provides the unified interface across every other system in the property.
• Is the system programmed before it reaches site?
  Yes. Every Crestron Custom system we build is pre-built, pre-programmed and tested at our UK workshop. The rack is wired, labelled, loaded with the programme and verified against the design documentation before a single cable is connected on site.
• Can you take over an existing Crestron system?
  Yes. We take over Crestron systems installed by other companies, auditing the existing hardware and programme, fixing faults at their cause and bringing the system to a standard we are confident to support. Read about our takeover service →

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