Private villa, El Madroñal

Finished home · system rescue · ~1,000 m² · one month · El Madroñal, Benahavís

The owners called us because, as far as they could tell, the house was haunted. Lights switched on and flickered in the middle of the night. The climate turned itself off. Some fittings never came on at all, and now and then the multiroom audio made noises no one had asked for. None of it was a ghost. It was an installation put together with the wrong parts and the wrong software, and it needed to be taken apart and done properly.

The challenge

The audit found the problem was not one fault but many. The wrong cables had been used, the components were cheap and the programs had been written badly, on unlicensed software. A house that misbehaves at random is harder to diagnose than one that is simply broken: nothing fails the same way twice. We had to trace each symptom back to its cause, decide what could be saved and what had to go, and do it without turning a lived-in home into a building site.

What we did

Foundation. We stripped out the faulty wiring and components and put the house on a stable base. Where a part was still sound, we kept it to respect the budget, and told the owners plainly which of those might need replacing later. No surprises left buried in the walls.

Capability. We serviced the Dahua CCTV and settled the multiroom audio that had been misbehaving. New thermostats with high-resolution IPS screens replaced the failed ones, and we fitted Belgian Lithoss switches and Jung fittings, so the parts you touch every day look and feel as considered as the ones you don’t.

Orchestration. Our team wrote new climate logic from scratch. The house now works out the most efficient way to reach a temperature and hold it with the smallest swings, so the owners only choose a number and the house does the rest. An Italian ThinKNX server, over a KNX and DALI layer on Schneider Electric switchgear, gives them remote control and scenes tied to real sunrise and sunset data. A minute before sunset, the garden, the library and the wine cellar light themselves.

The result

The house does as it is told again. The night-time surprises are gone, the climate holds steady without anyone tending it, and the parts the owners see every day were finished to the standard the house deserves. Where we kept older components to save money, they know exactly what was kept and why, so there is nothing hidden waiting to fail.