OTHER TECH

Control for the living-room systems and the multiroom setup - which includes the kitchen/dining area, the home office, the master bedroom and bath, and outdoors - is supplied by Elan's Via! system. A tethered Via! Valet touchscreen remote in the living room lets Charlie operate the home theater's various audio and video feeds. The other rooms have Elan's on-wall Via! touchpanels, while Elan Z250 keypads provide control outdoors. The office has an Apple G5 computer with a 23-inch Cinema HD display, an AirPort wireless hub, a 23-inch Philips LCD TV, and B&W speakers in the ceiling. (That's Gort in the doggie bed.)

Charlie planned to use keypads throughout the house, but once he added DVD playback and HDTV to the multiroom system, he realized that being able to see the various video sources on the touchpanels was a big advantage. Also, the upgradable Via! system allows for evolving technology in ways a keypad system can't.

When installer Young suggested mounting security cameras and patching them into the Elan system, Charlie was skeptical. "I told him, 'My house is 70% windows, so I don't need a camera to look out.'" But he's come to find them useful. In the master bedroom, Charlie and "friend" enjoy the Philips 23-inch LCD TV, Philips DVD player (built into the trunk), and Via! Valet touchscreen controller (on the table).

"If I'm in my kitchen, or office, or wherever I am, and somebody rings the doorbell, I can press ' * , 3, 1' on the phone and talk to them - again, this is through the Elan system. And I can say, 'Who's there?,' and they'll say, 'It's Mr. Murderer.' And I'll say, 'No, can't come in. Sorry.' If I'm standing near one of the Via! panels, I can press the top right corner of the screen and it turns into the picture from the camera at the front door so I can see who's there."

One Via! feature that Charlie has so far skipped is its ability to control his home's lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Lights are instead adjusted by Lutron's Spacer system. "Each room has a seven-button panel so you can have seven different lighting settings. In the living room, I can press one button and it becomes the Charlie's Going to Get Lucky mode. And the one below that is Charlie's Not Going to Get Lucky, which means everything's very bright."

The Dave Lennox Signature HVAC system is controlled by traditional thermostats. Heating and cooling might not seem to have much in common with home theater, but the Lennox system was chosen in part because it's the quietest one available.

Charlie fears that routing everything through the Via! would leave him with all the lights on and the furnace going full blast if the system ever went down. But Jim Young sees the Elan as a convenient way to control the whole house from one place. "The lighting and HVAC controls would just default to the hard buttons if anything ever happened to the Elan," he says.

Charlie is also keeping his computer network separate from the Elan system, instead using the Apple Airport wireless hub in his office on the second floor. "It's good anywhere in this house. I can even go down to the basement with my laptop and it works. I don't know how, but it does."