Older Buildings, Circuits First Audio Video | Home Theater Installations Serving Hollywood, FL

Seven homes in ten here were standing before 1980

Hollywood has 72,553 homes, and the striking thing about them is their age. The single largest group, 18,186 of them, went up between 1960 and 1969, and adding the decade either side accounts for better than two thirds of the city. Whatever else is true of an address here, the building was finished for a household with one television in it, and everything a whole-home system now does is something that building was never asked about.

That lands hardest on the part people leave until last, which is where the power comes from. A whole-home system is a continuous load — equipment in a rack, amplification, a network that never sleeps, a display or a projector, and in a theater all of it at once. A dedicated circuit is not an upgrade to that system. It is part of it, and it is settled at the distribution board rather than at the wall the screen goes on.

It is also the item with the longest tail on it. Cable can be pulled in the week it is wanted, but anything touching the supply involves a second trade, a scheduled isolation and a room that nobody can use while it happens. Deciding early how many circuits a design actually wants, and where they land relative to the equipment position, is what keeps that off the critical path. It costs almost nothing to draw and a great deal to add.

More than seven thousand homes here are closed up for part of the year

Hollywood holds 7,297 homes for seasonal, recreational or occasional use, three in five of everything standing vacant. Where that describes a property, the real test of a system is not the evening it was commissioned and demonstrated. It is the first evening back, months later, when the whole of it is expected to come up exactly as it was left, with nobody having touched anything in between.

That is a different brief from a house with somebody in it, and it points back at the supply. It wants a system that raises a fault while it is still a small one, instead of banking the news until somebody walks in. It wants scenes a guest or a cleaner can work without being taught. And it wants what happens after an interruption to be automatic and complete, because that particular failure is the one waiting at the door, and it is the one that turns a two-minute reset into a wasted first day.

The city holds both kinds of building at full scale

Some 31,158 of these homes are detached houses, while 21,826 sit in buildings of twenty units or more, and 13,871 of those are in buildings of fifty or more. Those are two different projects wearing one name. In the house, the roof space and the run out to the garage are yours and the constraint is labour. In the building, the route is a shared asset and the constraint is what may be opened, and by whom, and on whose timetable.

So a design here begins by establishing which of the two it is in, because everything downstream follows from that: how cabling is routed, where the equipment lives, how many separate openings the work needs, and what may honestly be surface-run. The equipment list at the end is very nearly the same in both cases. The programme that gets you there is not, and the programme is what people actually experience.

Age is an asset in one specific way

The oldest part of this stock is not a rounding error either: 3,558 homes here were standing before 1950 and another 16,540 arrived in the fifties. Housing of that age has nearly always been worked on since, and previous work leaves things behind — a redundant run, a chase opened for something long removed, a void created by a later addition. Those are worth hunting for before anything at all is cut. Nobody keeps the old cable; the opening it came through is frequently the best feature of the property.

Which means a project here begins one step earlier than it would in newer housing. Establish what the supply can carry and what the design intends to ask of it, find the routes that already exist and the ones that will have to be made, agree what disappears and what does not, and decide what goes on the walls after all of that. None of it is difficult in housing of this age. It is only expensive when it is discovered in the wrong order.