I'm a 'Tech Design Consultant' — This Is How I Hid Ultra-Modern Technology in the Most Beautiful 18th-Century Home in Mayfair

The project is a Georgian townhouse in the heart of Mayfair, originally built in 1826, and, from the outside, remarkably little has changed. Yet inside, interior designer Geraldine Dohogne and Architect RV DM Studio created something completely different: a double-height atrium, hand-painted ceilings, bespoke joinery, and gorgeous marble the owners sourced themselves. Our job (as tech design consultants) was to bring that house into the present day without anyone ever noticing we'd been there.

In 2026, even the most traditional homes need a little tech to adapt to current comforts. However, expertly hiding even the most beautiful smart home tech out of sight is more difficult than it sounds. To get an idea of what we were working with, this property has over a hundred lighting circuits, more than 70 switch positions, and 14 separate audio zones. Plus, heating, cooling, security, and networking throughout the house. The principal drawing room also contains an important private art collection, which brought its own requirements around temperature and humidity. So from quite early on, we had a simple rule for the project: the technology had to support the design rather than compete with it.

I've worked on a lot of period properties over the years, but this one was quite special. We worked closely with the client, architect, and interior designer from the early stages because most of the decisions that make technology discreet have to be made long before anyone sees the finished room (just like when planning lighting for your home). So, below I've broken down the process and how we made different elements of tech disappear in this beautiful period property.

Charlie McCourt

Charlie McCourt is the co-founder and director of Equippd. He and his brother Matthew founded Equippd in 2016. They are a London-based technology consultancy and integrator, specializing in intelligent systems for residential projects. They work across lighting, climate, shading, audio-visual, networking, and home cinema, usually alongside architects and interior designers. Much of their work is in traditional, heritage, and listed properties, where introducing modern technology requires a slightly different approach. It's less about putting technology on display and more about making the interior functional without compromising it. They've worked with fantastic studios including Salvesen Graham, Studio Jo Cowen and Flower Michelin, and over the years that's naturally pushed them further into projects where the detailing and coordination are particularly important. Charlie's own role covers business development, new partnerships and project delivery. On a project like this, that means being involved with the client, architects and designers from the early stages, rather than arriving at the end to install the technology.

Lighting

There's sometimes an assumption that intelligent lighting (or even smart switches and bulbs) belongs only in contemporary houses, but actually traditional interiors see some of the biggest benefits from good lighting.

Traditional rooms are often incredibly rich in color, texture, and detail — timber, fabrics, wallpapers, artwork, and decorative plasterwork — and the quality of the light has a huge impact on how all of that is experienced. To best highlight these characteristics, I tend to use high-quality, warmer-toned light sources in these spaces. Then, adding intelligent controls allows us to tune and layer that light so the interior feels its best at different times of day. It's not about making a period room feel more modern; if anything, it's about using modern technology to bring out more of what's already there.

The scale of this house made that control particularly useful too. With more than a hundred dimmable lighting circuits across the property, nobody wants to walk around switching everything off individually at the end of the evening. Something as simple as a master-off function on a traditional dolly switch circuit next to the front door or the bed makes a huge difference. You get all the sophistication behind the scenes, but using it still feels completely natural.

Plus, we gave the switches themselves as much attention as anything else. We specified Forbes & Lomax retractive switches in three finishes: aged brass through the entrance hall and formal floors, bronze in the family spaces, and verdigris in the atrium and lower ground. We looked at the feel of the switches as well as the finish. These are controls somebody touches every day, so in an interior where everything else has been considered to this level, they need to feel right as well as look right.

The kitchen lighting and switches are probably my favorite example. The cabinetry was designed by the owner and made by Ledbury Studio using verdigris copper panels. Rather than carrying the switch finish through from the adjoining spaces, we used verdigris switches specifically for that room. It's a tiny detail in the context of the whole house, but those details add up.

And where we didn't need a switch, we tried not to have one. Motion sensors were hand-painted to blend into the ceilings and walls, and touchscreens were concealed inside cupboards on each floor. The lighting also changes subtly through the day, so the family doesn't have to constantly select different scenes just to get the right atmosphere.

A well-planned, adaptable, and layered lighting scheme makes all the difference.

Integrating Smart Sound

We took a similar approach with the audio. There are fourteen independent zones throughout the house, running from the kitchen up to the roof terrace, but we didn't want fourteen rooms full of obvious speakers.

So, in the formal reception rooms, we used invisible speakers that are plastered directly into the walls and ceilings and then decorated over. You hear the music, but no obvious speaker is producing it. It's kind of like taking the luxury of the best Bluetooth speaker and going a step further in terms of design.

The double-height atrium was more challenging because of the volume of the space, so we supplemented the invisible speakers with discreet architectural speakers to get the coverage right. Where a grille had to remain visible, we had it sprayed to the exact RAL color of the surrounding paintwork.

The most unusual speakers are probably in two rooms with hand-painted, frescoed ceilings. We couldn't simply put a standard speaker grille through the artwork, so the same artists who decorated the ceilings hand-painted the grilles to match. Unless you know where they are, they're very difficult to spot.

Even the doorbell uses the audio system. Rather than installing separate chimes around the house, the doorbell tone plays through the same concealed speakers. It's a very small piece of integration, but it means we avoid adding another visible object to the interior.

Heating and Cooling

Building a home that will stay cool is important, especially in older homes. However, the climate system had another job beyond keeping the family comfortable. The principal drawing room contains an important private art collection, so temperature, humidity, and ventilation needed to remain within controlled parameters for the artwork as well.

We worked with Calibre Climate to coordinate the underfloor heating, fan coil units, and cooling into one system. At the time the project was completed, it was the largest residential deployment of Polar Bear Design's Zentium platform. There's a considerable amount of engineering behind that, but of course, very little of it is visible in the finished rooms.

In spaces where the interior design couldn't accommodate a conventional thermostat, we developed concealed temperature sensor probes in-house. That allowed us to monitor the actual room temperature without putting another control on the wall. Where thermostats were required, their metal finishes were matched to the Forbes & Lomax switches in the same room.

Again, it's a relatively small detail, but it stops the technology from looking like a collection of unrelated products that have been added afterwards.

Televisual

In terms of incorporating clever televisual components, the family room was an interesting challenge because it needed to do two very different jobs. During the day, it's an arts and crafts space for the children. In the evening, it can become a proper home cinema room.

A projection screen drops from the ceiling, the projector comes out of a concealed housing, and the surround-sound system is built into the room. It creates a magical entertainment space, but once everything is switched off, it all disappears again. You're not left with a cinema screen dominating a children's room for the other 95 percent of the time, or wasting time planning a TV wall.

There's also a second, more informal media room for everyday television, where the loudspeakers are concealed behind acoustically transparent fabric. That gives us proper cinematic sound without introducing visible speakers around the screen.

We didn't start with the idea that everything had to be hidden simply for the sake of hiding it. It was more about making sure each room could work properly for all the different ways the family wanted to use it.

For all of that to work, there's obviously a lot happening elsewhere in the building that nobody sees. Three equipment rooms serve the property through a dedicated fiber backbone, connecting the lighting, climate, audio, networking, and security systems. Keeping the main equipment away from the rooms themselves also helps us reduce the amount of hardware and cabling that needs to be accommodated within finished joinery.

We assembled, programmed, and tested the major systems at our workshop in Surrey before taking them to site. That's become an important part of how we work on projects like this. When you've got specialist plasterwork, finished joinery, and multiple trades working around each other, you don't want to be discovering basic integration problems in the finished house.

The network was also deliberately designed with more capacity than the family currently needs. Technology will inevitably change over the life of the property, but the infrastructure inside the walls is much harder to change. For a house that's already stood for two hundred years, it made sense to think beyond the technology being installed on day one.

The thing I like most about the finished project isn't really the amount of technology in it; it's that you can walk through the house and very little of it jumps out at you. There is a huge amount happening behind the walls, but the rooms still feel like they belong to the architecture and the interior design rather than to the systems we've installed.

For me, that's what good residential technology should do. It should make a complicated house straightforward to live in while allowing the design to remain the thing you actually notice.

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