This was not a home short on technology. Every subsystem in it had been specified on its own merits, and each was the best product in its category. At the centre sits Elan, delivering the experience the family lives with daily — the touchscreens, the remotes, the phone, the lighting and AV, and a flawless native Lutron integration.

The opportunity was to widen the circle.

Four of these subsystems are the ones that make an integrator pause. A commercial building-automation bus, a manufacturer's climate cloud, an irrigation service and an RF motor controller have nothing in common with one another — they come from different industries, built for different purposes. Each of them can be brought into a professional system; each has been, many times. But each has traditionally been a project in its own right: dedicated hardware, a dedicated driver, a dedicated license and specialist time — repeated four times over, for one house.

For the homeowner, the friction was at the edges. The core of the house — lighting, AV, keypads — was excellent. Adjusting the heat, checking the irrigation and retracting a screen were the things that still meant reaching for something else.

Deville Group deployed a single Innovo Magic Cube as an extension of the existing system. It translates the four outside subsystems into devices Elan understands natively, and adds an extra layer of intelligence that builds on the Lutron integration already in place.

Nothing was replaced. No controllers, no wiring, no keypads. The Magic Cube does not compete with the control platform — it hands it more of the house to control.

Delivered without a site visit

The residence is in Canada. Every hour of this engagement — the integration work, the configuration, the testing and the handover — was carried out remotely over Magic Cube Cloud. No trips to site, no waiting on scheduling, no travel billed to the client.

Inside the Magic Cube, two things run side by side: Home Assistant, the best-in-class open-source automation engine, and Innovo's own API controllers, which do the work of speaking to each subsystem and presenting it to Elan in a form it handles natively. The homeowner never sees either one. They see their own system, doing more.

Radiant floor heating

The 12 heated zones were the hardest problem and the biggest win. Innovo built a purpose-made integration for the home's commercial heating controllers and presented the result to Elan in the form it already excels at: every zone appears as a normal, familiar thermostat, with current temperature and setpoint, adjustable from any screen in the house or from a phone anywhere in the world.

No controllers were replaced. No wiring was changed. The existing heating investment simply became something Elan could drive.

Climate, irrigation and screens

The same Magic Cube brought in the rest of the house:

• Carrier climate control — forced-air heating and cooling alongside the radiant zones, so the homeowner sees one complete picture of comfort rather than two competing ones.
• Hydrawise irrigation — landscape watering visible and controllable from the same place as everything else.
• Bond Bridge — the kitchen screen, island screen, great room screen and outdoor awnings, all wirelessly driven and now fully addressable.

Each of these would traditionally have been its own integration project, with its own hardware and its own license. Here they were additive: the device was already in the home, already licensed, already talking to Elan.

One detail illustrates the whole engagement, and it is the part of the house that was already working beautifully. Elan and Lutron are an outstanding pairing: the keypads were integrated natively, the lighting was flawless, and none of it needed changing. The homeowner simply wanted to get more out of it.

There is a Lutron keypad in the kitchen with a button labelled Cuisine Screen. Any integration can make that button send a command — open, or close. What no standard pairing can do is make a single button behave like a full shade control, because one press carries no information about what the screen happens to be doing at that moment.

That is where the Magic Cube added value. Without changing anything the homeowner could see, it put a layer of intelligence behind the existing button.

That last row is the one that matters. The homeowner can halt the screen at any partial position simply by pressing again — the behavior of a premium motorized shade, from one button on a keypad never designed to provide it. The Magic Cube tracks the screen's motion internally, so it always knows which of the three responses is correct.

The same approach was extended to the other screens and awnings in the home. The keypads look and behave exactly as they always did. They simply do more now.

For the homeowner

• The interface now reaches the whole house. The system they already knew how to use simply covers more of it.
• Nothing was thrown away. Every existing subsystem was preserved and made more valuable.
• Remote access across the board. Heating, climate, irrigation and screens are all reachable from anywhere.
• Automation across boundaries. With every system available in one place, they can respond to each other — which isn't possible while each product remains an island.

For the dealer

Elan already wins on experience, reliability and the interface the client lives with — that is why it was specified here. The Magic Cube extends how far that system can reach.

Reaching these four subsystems by conventional means would have meant four separate integration projects: multiple bridge devices, multiple drivers, multiple licenses and — for a residence in Canada — multiple visits. Instead: a single Magic Cube, a single license, and not one trip to site. Lower cost to the client, higher margin to the dealer, dramatically less hardware in the rack, and a far shorter path from sale to a working system.

It also changes the shape of the conversation. A home full of premium equipment from unrelated industries becomes a home the control system can run end to end, rather than a compromise.