For luxury home builder Michael Nouri, the smart home experience should extend from the house to the entire property and even the sea. Nouri, who builds many homes on the coast of Florida, includes stunning backyards in his projects — along with an optional yacht for the homeowner to purchase — and the technology experience is the same from carpet to grass to waves.
Nouri recently completed a move-in-ready estate with integrator Neil Lorick of South Florida’s Automation Sensation that is yacht-less (for now) but features all the luxuries a homeowner could want both indoors and out. The spectacular waterfront home, offered now at just under $13 million, is move-in ready with a home theater, digital glass elevator, and a gym with sauna for starters. As the Zillow listing states, “The 16,840 SF lot is meticulously landscaped and has a brand new 50-foot dock with direct ocean access.”
Maybe you’d like a yacht with that…
An Island of Your Own
For Nouri, the outdoors gets the same treatment as the indoors because it has to be a seamless experience.
“People come to Florida to live outdoors — we have six months out of the year that we don’t need air conditioning,” says Nouri. “That’s why our homes are designed with no separation between indoors and outdoors. If we build a kitchen inside, we build a matching outdoor kitchen. Every detail, from dynamic lighting to immersive soundscapes, is crafted to unify both spaces into one cohesive experience.”
The property is quite long as it reaches from the street to the shoreline, but at 50 feet, it is not too wide. Still, thanks to rows of tall, beautiful trees on either side, there are no neighbors in sight. And while the trees look naturally lovely throughout the day, they really come to life at night thanks to copious amounts of landscape lighting.
“You put the shrubbery and trees in different layers, and then each layer has to be colored,” says Nouri. “We do landscape lighting in a way that creates dimension rather than just shoot a light up into a tree. With the light, you create illusion, and we call ourselves ‘outdoor magicians’ to unify the indoor and outdoor and to expand them to make it look like you are on your own island — nothing exists outside of your space.”
This design required 75 landscape lights to be installed by Lorick and his team, with additional lights installed on the walkways, under the eaves, on the patio, and by the pool.
Outdoor living isn’t just a visual experience, and the audio complements the scenes nicely, both inside and out. “The music for indoor and outdoor must be in sync so, as you walk out, you have the same kind of music all the way to your dock,” Nouri says. “When you do that properly, you don’t feel like you’re in and out — you’re just floating.”
The sound can be consistent but can also be catered to the different areas. “We set the zones up differently outside,” Lorick adds. “The patio and the pool are in their own zones, and then the landscape is another zone. People want to hear different things when they are hanging around the patio and pool areas.”
The outdoor areas use 15 Sonance Mag Series speakers with eight ceiling-mounted speakers. The patio area uses four Sonance speakers and one subwoofer.
One System to Control It All
The entire property, inside and out, is automated by a URC Total Control System, earning South Florida’s Automation the Most Unique Installation from URC’s most recent Unsurpassed Awards. The Total Control system handles 40 Lutron lighting RA3 dimmers and uses URC’s HDA for audio distribution.
Lorick and his team created many scenes at Nouri’s request, and, at least until the home finds an owner, there is one scene in particular that gets the most use. “We created a ‘Realtor’ scene so I could stop getting those phone calls to activate certain lights and put on soft music,” says Lorick. “I made it easy to demo the house. The lighting goes on, the music comes on, and it turns the home theater on. Plus, I recorded Michael saying, ‘Welcome to the Nouri home — the home of the future,’ and that is announced when the button is pushed. The realtors hit the button, and that’s it. They do not need to touch anything else.”
The Realtor scene is programmed to set the stage for a unique buyer experience, and it includes all interior and exterior lights, plus a deep blue light for the pool. URC’s HDA plays jazz on the audio system both inside and out.
The First Smart Home
Nouri knows quite a bit about the evolution of the smart home, as he is proclaimed the creator of the first smart home by both himself and a 1989 article from the Los Angeles Times called, “The lights and the rest of the house are run by a talking computer named Alexander.” Yes, the system that the writer, T. W. McGarry, describes in that 36-year-old article is run by a voice-command assistant with a name that is remarkably close to the one most used today.
Outdoor Week: The Full-Sun TV Experience
He has been honing his system, called “The Nouri Way,” for decades and is now able to build magnificent, strong (which is needed on the storm-heavy Florida coast), stylistic, and smart houses in only nine months from a cleared property to a finished project. He now plans to head to California’s Pacific Palisades with his team, including Lorick, to help rebuild the homes lost in the fires.
“Reconstruction is about more than just rebuilding walls; it’s about integrating everything — structure, technology, and design — into one seamless vision,” says Nouri, who is also a trained structural engineer. “That’s why I’m bringing my team there — to introduce a new era of smart, resilient, and beautifully integrated homes to the West Coast.”
