Project Spotlight · New Canaan
Elm: one room, every hour of the night.
A New Canaan restaurant where the light, the sound, and the picture all move together, set by the staff, from a single button, as the room turns from lunch to dinner to a private evening in back.
A restaurant is never one room.
Lunch → Close, one button each · Savant · JBL Professional, streamed on Savant · Lighting · audio · video
The brief
The room has to be many rooms.
Elm sits in a stylish New Canaan storefront, walnut and warm light, an open kitchen, a bar along one wall. Chef Luke Venner's kitchen changes with the season, and so does the room: a bright midday, the turn into evening, a full dinner, a late drink, a private party in the back dining room. Each of those is a different feeling, and the difference is mostly light and sound. We built the systems that make the room become each of them on cue.
What we did
The whole environment, on one platform.
Elevated Integration designed and installed the lighting, the audio, and the video throughout Elm, the whole environment, on one platform. The concealed warm lighting along the slatted wall, the glow behind the bar, the pendants over the back table, the displays, and the music are all one system, not five remotes and a wall of switches. The staff run it, not the other way around.
- Architectural & feature lighting
- Whole-venue audio
- Video displays
- Savant control
- Savant Scenes (one-button presets)
- JBL Professional loudspeakers
Savant Scenes
One button, the whole room.
The heart of it is Savant Scenes. Instead of asking a host to chase dimmers and volume knobs, we built a setting for each part of the night, Lunch, Dinner, Bar, Private Event, Close, and put each behind a single button. One press takes the lights to where they should be, brings the music to the right level in the right zones, and sets the displays. The room changes in a second, the same way every time, whoever is on shift. On a busy Friday that consistency is the product.
The sound
Sound that fits the room.
Music runs on JBL Professional loudspeakers, tuned to the space and zoned so the bar can live louder than the dining room, streamed through Savant so a server can change what's playing without leaving the floor. It's there when you want to notice it and gone when you want to talk.
The point
The work disappears, and what's left is the evening.
None of this is on display. A guest feels a room that always seems to be lit exactly right and never fights to be heard, and never thinks about why. The staff get a night that runs on one button instead of a dozen. That is the whole idea, the same idea we bring to a home, a room that sets itself, proven in a working restaurant where it has to perform every night.
Explore Commercial AV & Automation, Savant control, and audio.
Photography courtesy of Elm Restaurant.
A space that sets itself.
Restaurant, office, or home, tell us how the space is used and we'll build the room around it.