Pole House

There is nowhere to hide a cable in a glass box suspended forty metres above a beach. The Pole House is Australia's most photographed beach house — first built above Fairhaven in the 1970s, then rebuilt by F2 Architecture as a single cantilevered room on its original concrete column, alongside a new two-storey main house at street level. The architecture set the rule for the technology: nothing visible, everything working, in a location that actively fights electronics. The Surf Coast's mains supply is unstable, and unstable power makes dimmed LED flicker — the kind of detail nobody notices until they are standing in a glass room at dusk and the light won't hold steady. The lighting control system was engineered around trailing-edge dimming to run flicker-free LED throughout, integrated with motorised blinds, climate and security, so a house with four glass walls could still be private, comfortable and secure without a single visible piece of equipment. ZELO — then trading as Advanced Lifestyle Solutions — delivered the home automation and technology across both houses: electrical installation, lighting control (Philips Dynalite with a Control4 supervisory layer), networking and wireless, security alarm and cameras, CCTV, access control, intercom, audio visual integration and technology design. The result photographs like there is no technology in the house at all. That was the brief.