Telluride
Houses built before anyone imagined a wire.
- ELEVATION
- 8,750 ft
- FROM THE SHOP
- You are at it
- BUILT FROM
- Victorian timber, then stone and glass
In the old houses there is nowhere for anything to go. No chase, no attic worth the name, plaster over lath, and a landmark district that means you do not simply cut a channel through the front elevation. In the new ones there is room for everything and a wall of north-facing glass that undoes a projector unless somebody thought about it at the drawing stage. Both are solved on site, in person, by someone who has been in a hundred of these buildings.
Mountain Village
Most of the region's big houses, and most of its construction.
- ELEVATION
- 9,545 ft
- FROM THE SHOP
- Up the gondola
- BUILT FROM
- Timber frame, stone, and a lot of glass
The work here is shaped by logistics as much as by design: coordinating with property managers and HOAs, getting equipment up the hill, and building systems that a housekeeper or a caretaker can operate on a Tuesday in April without ringing anybody. A gondola ride from the shop means a service call is a service call, not an expedition.
Placerville
The junction everything passes through.
- ELEVATION
- ≈7,320 ft
- FROM THE SHOP
- Sixteen miles down valley on 145
- BUILT FROM
- Old timber, river rock, and additions
The houses along the canyon are their own kind of problem, and a satisfying one: hundred-year-old timber that no mount was designed for, walls that were three different walls at three different times, and a canyon that shades out whatever the signal was supposed to be. The work is a television anchored into something real, a connection that holds, a network that reaches the shop building across the yard, and, increasingly, the same full systems we build up the hill.
Norwood
This is the one where we stop commuting.
- ELEVATION
- 7,006 ft
- FROM THE SHOP
- West end of the county, and it is home
- BUILT FROM
- Ranch buildings, new builds, outbuildings
Out here a property is rarely one building, and that is the design problem. Getting a reliable connection to a shop two hundred feet from the house, or to a barn, or to a gate, is the job as often as anything indoors is, and it is the part that consumer equipment fails at completely. Beyond that it is the same standard as Telluride: audio in the walls, one app for the house, a theater for February. None of the logistics.
Ridgway
The mesa is building fine homes. It never got its own integrator.
- ELEVATION
- 6,985 ft
- FROM THE SHOP
- Down 145, then 62 over Dallas Divide
- BUILT FROM
- New builds on the mesa, ranch parcels
Connectivity is almost always the first conversation here. Whatever the connection to the property turns out to be, the answer behind it is the same: a wired backbone, coverage engineered to the floor plan and the outbuildings, and a rack that is labelled so the next fault takes minutes. Then the good part, music on the deck facing the range, a media room for winter, and a house that looks after itself between visits.
Ouray
A second box canyon, with a second set of rules.
- ELEVATION
- 7,792 ft
- FROM THE SHOP
- Via Ridgway, then ten miles south on 550
- BUILT FROM
- Brick, stone, and 1890s carpentry
That suits us. The work here is remodels of buildings worth remodelling, systems fitted into houses that will not be altered to suit them, and the connectivity that everything else waits on. We treat the 550 as home territory rather than an away fixture, which is why a service call gets scheduled properly instead of quoted with a highway surcharge.
Montrose
The corridor everyone drives, and nobody services properly.
- ELEVATION
- 5,807 ft
- FROM THE SHOP
- About 65 miles, scheduled, not same-day
- BUILT FROM
- Valley-floor builds and acreage
It is about 65 miles from the shop, which we schedule for rather than pretend away: visits are planned, parts come with us, and the diagnosis happens on the phone first so the drive is worth making. Mounted televisions, networks that reach the whole property, whole-home audio and full systems, the same work, the same standard.
AND THE REST OF IT
Ophir and Rico are on the list too, along with the ranch parcels and canyon houses that do not sit inside any town boundary at all. Tell us the road and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it. If we are not, we will usually know who is.
