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winter
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spr ing
Heating & Cooling
Ray and Peter have installed a high-tech Daikin super energy-
efficient heating & cooling system, fabricated in Japan and designed
for small office buildings so that one can heat and/or cool every room
simultaneously. Some rooms can be heated while others are being air-
conditioned. They visited the manufacturer’s demo laboratory in Dallas,
Texas before ordering it. “This will be the first large residence on the
West Coast using this system,” Ray says, adding that, “It’s very clean,
very quiet and almost invisible. When you have a house this size it’s a
good fit.”
For insulation, they went back to the late nineteenth century, to a
product called rock wool (made and packaged by a company called Roksul),
which is really spun steel. “We had to go to Canada to have it brought in,”
Peter reveals. The product is in all the ceilings, the walls, and floor joists.
Peter points out that, “The beauty of it is that it is using material
taken from old slag piles from steel mills. So it is recycled from stuff
that would have been thrown away in the eighteen and nineteen
hundreds.” Rock wool apparently has three times as much sound
absorption, offers 25% to 30% more thermal insulation, and has a
higher melting temperature than fiberglass. It’s also cheaper, even
including shipping. “We save twenty-five percent by using recycled
material, even bringing it all the way from Canada,” Peter insists,
noting that, “It’s green because it re-uses all the slag piles that have
been there for over a hundred years.”
They used the Biltmore as inspiration for the heating & cooling vents
and grillwork, which are both handsome and nearly invisible.
Security & “Safe Rooms”
“Normally, when you have an intrusion alarm, all you see is a big box
on the wall,” Ray observes, “while the [laser activated] ones we have are
barely visible. We designed and engineered all that ourselves,” he says.
There are three built-in and disguised safe rooms, one on every level.
Each safe room has a separate telephone line, video surveillance, and
a gun vault accessible via a thumbprint or key code, so a child cannot
accidentally access the firearm.
The safe rooms have separate access to inside the walls via a ceiling
panel, and one can travel from one to another and from floor to floor if
necessary. One can also go into the walls to reach the electric wires and
plumbing.
“It’s not just a safe room,” Ray notes, “it’s also a safe. A place where
one would put valuables. It allows for dual purposes.” The video inside
allows one to monitor what goes on outside, as all the rooms in the house
can be observed by small undetectable cameras that download the images
on a hard drive. “Custom cameras are being fabricated for us overseas,”
Ray says, adding that, “all will be accessible, not only in the safe rooms but
long distance, via computer.”
The custom cameras will be set up so that the video recorder starts
only when and if there is motion or sound in front of that camera. It will
only go on if there is motion at the gate, not if the wind blows the tree’s
leaves. It’s a very smart system. “A couple of the cameras,” Ray confides,
“once they see motion,
follow
that motion, and
zoom in
on a motion. So if
someone gets on the property, it senses the motion and focuses on it; the
camera pans and zooms on them and then follows them.”
The homeowner can access that from an iPhone anywhere in the
world or on a laptop computer. “If you get motion, the system will send
a signal and an e-mail telling you that there is motion in the master
bedroom, or wherever, and then you can view the video on your iPhone.”
19th-century stained-glass windows, chandeliers, and decorative iron found
in Buenos Aires was added to the original architecture and used throughout
EAL ESTATES