Cotmandene, Dorking, with the spire of St Martin's Church and Ranmore Common beyond. Photo: Mertbiol, CC0What kind of homes do we work in around Dorking?
Three broad types come up again and again, and each asks for a different approach.
- Period town houses. Solid walls, original cornicing and fireplaces, and no appetite for chasing new cable runs through plaster. Here we lean on wireless lighting control and discreet in-ceiling speakers fitted during redecoration.
- Cottages and older rural homes. Low ceilings, thick walls and small rooms. A dedicated cinema is often impractical, so a well-planned media room that stays a sitting room works better.
- Country houses and outbuildings. Barns, garages and garden buildings make good cinema rooms because light control is easy, but they need a proper network link back to the house.
From our Fetcham projectCan you add smart lighting to an older house without rewiring?
Yes, in most cases. Lutron makes wireless lighting control that replaces a bank of switches with a single keypad, and it retrofits without lifting floorboards in every room. We design and install Lutron lighting control as Lutron lighting specialists, usually tied into Control4 so the lights, blinds, heating and music sit on one app. In a period house that means scenes such as evening, film and goodnight with no new holes in original plaster beyond the keypad itself.
Where you are renovating anyway, wired is still our first choice for reliability. We will tell you honestly which suits your house at the survey.
From our Fetcham projectWhy does the network matter so much in the countryside?
Thick walls, long plots and separate buildings are hard on Wi-Fi. Every smart home system, streaming service and video door entry camera depends on the network underneath it, so on rural homes we often start there. A wired backbone with properly placed access points is the difference between a system that works every day and one that drops out in the kitchen. Our data and Wi-Fi networks page explains the approach, and our Thames Ditton garden room shows it in practice: a dedicated fibre line run more than 70 metres across the garden to feed a Ubiquiti network in the new building.
Our demonstration cinema in Walton-on-ThamesPlanning, the Surrey Hills and conservation areas
Most cinema and smart home work happens inside the house and does not need planning permission. External changes are different. Mole Valley District Council has 26 conservation areas, including three covering parts of Dorking town, and much of the land around the town is inside the Surrey Hills National Landscape, which carries the same legal protection it had as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. If your plans include anything visible outside, such as a new outbuilding, external speakers or cameras on a front elevation, check with Mole Valley's planning team before work starts. We are not planning advisers, but we will flag anything that may need a conversation with the council.
Our nearest published project is a few miles north: a cinema room with a pool table and bar in Fetcham, built for a family who had been let down by an unreliable system in their previous house. It now runs on Control4, with a Sony 4K laser projector and Sonance speakers behind a 126 inch acoustically transparent screen.
The best way to judge any of this is to hear it. Come and sit in our demonstration cinema in Walton-on-Thames, then book a free design consultation at your home.
