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Smart Home & Home Automation Installers — Bath, Bristol & the South West

The best home technology is the kind you stop noticing. Lighting that suits the hour without anyone touching a switch. Music that follows you from the kitchen to the garden. Heating that is ahead of you rather than behind you, blinds that ease down as the sun comes round, and one button by the bed that settles the whole house for the night. That is what home automation should feel like — and it is what Hidden Home Technology, a smart home installer based in Bath, designs, installs and looks after across Bristol, Somerset and the South West.

Many people find us through our home cinemas, but on most projects the larger share of the work is the whole-house system around them: lighting control, multi-room audio, heating, shading, security and the network that holds it all together — designed as one system, installed by one team, and supported for years afterwards.

The clue is in our name. Done properly, none of this dominates a home. The keypads are considered, the kit is out of sight, and the technology recedes into the architecture. What is left is a house that simply works.

What home automation actually covers

“Smart home” gets used loosely — a video doorbell here, a voice speaker there. A real whole-house system is different: it is designed rather than accumulated, and every part of it answers to the same control. Here is what that includes.

Lighting control — Lutron & Rako

Lighting is where most of our automation projects begin, because nothing changes how a home feels more. We design and install Lutron and Rako lighting control systems: a single engraved keypad in place of a bank of switches, scenes set for cooking, dining, reading or a film night, and schedules that follow the seasons so the house is never lit like an office at 10pm. Our lighting design and control service covers the design side — circuits, layers and scene planning — as well as the control system itself.

Blinds, curtains & shading

Motorised blinds and curtains earn their keep quietly: privacy arriving at dusk without a lap of the house, shading that tracks the sun to protect furniture and keep rooms comfortable, blackout that actually means blackout in bedrooms and cinema rooms. Tied into the lighting system, “Goodnight” can mean the whole house — lights, blinds and all.

Multi-room audio & video

Music in any room without a rack of equipment in every room. Sources live out of sight; what you see is a discreet ceiling speaker and a volume control, or nothing at all. And because we are also a specialist hi-fi retailer, the same ears that voice our reference listening rooms tune the kitchen ceiling speakers — multi-room audio done to a standard, not just to a spec sheet.

Heating & climate

Underfloor heating, radiators and cooling brought into the same interface and the same schedules as everything else, zone by zone — so the guest room is not heated all winter for the two weekends it is used, and the house is warm when you are in it rather than when a wall thermostat guesses you might be.

Security, CCTV & entry

Cameras, video door entry, gate control and alarm integration, designed alongside the rest of the system rather than bolted on. Answer the gate from the kitchen or from your phone, check the drive without leaving bed, and let the house respond for you — lights coming on when the alarm triggers, or an away mode that makes the place look convincingly lived in.

Networking & Wi-Fi

The unglamorous part that decides whether everything else works. Every system above depends on the network underneath it, so we treat cabling and Wi-Fi as infrastructure, not an afterthought: a proper wired backbone, business-grade access points placed for the building rather than the broadband router’s convenience, and coverage that reaches the garden office. If a smart home is going to be reliable, it starts here.

Whole-house control — Control4 & URC

This is the layer that ties it all together: one app, one family of keypads and handheld remotes, one logic for the whole house instead of a dozen competing apps. We are certified Control4 installers and work daily with URC Total Control, choosing between them on the merits of each project. Where a house already runs on another platform, such as Crestron, we can usually integrate alongside what is there or migrate it in planned stages rather than ripping it out.

How we deliver it

Design. Every project starts with how you live, not with a product list. We walk the house — or the drawings, on a new build — room by room, and turn that into a clear specification: circuits, cable schedules, equipment positions and control layout. Architects, builders and electricians get proper documentation to work from, and you get a design you can actually read.

Installation. Our own engineers carry out the work, from first-fix cabling to final rack-build, coordinating with your other trades so the right cables are in the right walls at the right time. On a renovation we plan around the household; on a new build we slot into the programme.

Commissioning. This is where a pile of equipment becomes a system: programming the scenes, naming things the way your family actually refers to them, and walking everyone through it — including the babysitter test: if a guest can’t put the lights and the telly on, we haven’t finished. We then fine-tune once you have lived with it, because real life always improves on the plan.

Support. The team that designed the system answers the phone about it — one point of contact who knows the house, not a call centre reading a script. Systems are documented and handed over properly, many issues can be resolved remotely, and when you extend the house or the system, we pick up where we left off.

Why Hidden Home Technology

Where we work

We are based in Bath and most of our home automation work is within an hour or so of home: Bristol, Somerset, Wiltshire, the Cotswolds and Gloucestershire. We also take on the right projects further afield — South Wales, Cornwall and London and the Home Counties — where the brief justifies the travel. If you are unsure whether we cover you, ask; the answer is usually yes.

Questions we’re often asked

Can you automate an existing house, or only new builds? Both, and retrofit is a large share of our work. Modern lighting and control systems have excellent wireless options, so automating an existing home rarely means chasing cables through every wall — a period property can gain scene lighting, multi-room audio and whole-house control with remarkably little disruption. A new build or renovation simply lets us wire everything properly from day one, which is why it pays to involve us at drawing stage.

Can you work with a system another company installed? Usually, yes. We start with an audit of what is there and give you an honest read: sometimes the right answer is to keep the backbone and bring the programming up to date; sometimes part of it has reached the end of its life. Plenty of our clients came to us with a system nobody would support any more — that is a problem we know how to inherit.

Will we end up with one app for everything? That is the point of a proper control system. Lighting, music, heating, blinds, cameras and the cinema in one app, on keypads and remotes that work the same way in every room — instead of a different app for every gadget. It should be simple enough that guests never need instructions.

What does home automation cost? It scales with scope — a lighting control system for a handful of rooms is a very different project from a whole-house installation with audio, shading and security. We design to the house and the brief first, then quote item by item so you can see exactly where the budget goes. No packages, no surprises.

Start with a conversation

Tell us about the house and how you want to live in it. We will visit, talk through what is worth doing — and what is not — and put a clear proposal together. Or come and see a working system at our Basingstoke showroom first.

Get in touch to arrange a visit or a demonstration.