Big House in Little Hardy

Jun 1, 2015 | Life

[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell

images:courtesy Amy Long”][/title]

Some of the prettiest land in Arkansas is in and around Hardy, population 772. The town sits in the Ozark foothills on the Spring River in Sharp County. If you’ve heard of Hardy in recent days, it’s likely because of Discovery Channel’s (Clash of the Ozarks), which follows two longtime feuding families.

But there’s another reason Hardy is making news, and that’s a 43,000 square foot house that’s a technological wonder. One of the people who knows the house best is Ryan Heringer, who’s with Sound Concepts in Jonesboro. The owners came in to buy a TV in early 2009, and started talking to Ryan about an automation system for the new home they were planning. He expected, at the most, a 3,000 square foot house. When they brought in their floor plans, he was startled. “It was like four levels, and I thought, Wow! How big is this house?” Ryan says. After careful calculation, he estimated it would take thirty minutes just to walk through every room, and forty-five if the homeowner was stopping to switch on the lights.

While it is a mammoth, it’s not a fussy house, meaning it is not filled with delicate fabrics or furniture that appears to have once been owned by royalty. What it does have is lots of exposed wood, tall windows, open spaces, and chandeliers made out of antlers. There are even antlers used as railings on the staircase. The eight bedroom house also has: a rock climbing wall, a golf simulation room and putting green, a barber shop, a gym, a tanning room, a poker room, an outdoor kitchen, a tennis court, a billiards room, a twelve car garage, and a pool with a grotto you can swim beneath. There’s even a deer processing plant on the grounds.

During construction, the house drew so much attention that the owners, who are not releasing their names to the media, had to block the road and put up “No Trespassing” signs. Once the sprawling estate was finished, in the spring of 2013, it was a thing of wonder. “When you drive up to it, it looks like a hotel,” Ryan says. “It was the largest non-commercial job by square footage we had done.”

The home uses a system called the ELAN g! that allows each family member to regulate much of what happens on their property. “They can use their iPhones or iPads or Droids to control the heat and air, the lights, operate the shades,” Ryan says. “There are also forty touch screens, in the walls and on tabletops.”

There are thirty TVs, three surround systems, including a home theater with a 3D projector, and twenty-six video zones with fourteen available video sources, meaning the family chooses what they watch in each of those zones and which source that video comes from. The same is true for the thirty audio zones, where they listen to everything from downloaded music to Pandora to Sirius XM radio. Twenty-four surveillance cameras protect the property, and there is Wi-Fi available everywhere.

So much high-tech equipment has been installed that in some areas of the house, tucked away from view, there are places that look like the workings of a television control room. Ryan says installing the equipment wasn’t the biggest challenge. The wiring took the most effort, and his crew spent two weeks getting it done. When the project was complete, Ryan toured the house. It felt like something out of a movie, and Ryan was proud to be part of it. Given the chance, he would live in a house like this one without hesitation, but only with the system Sound Concepts installed. The reason? He laughs and mentions again the forty-five minute walk-through just to switch on every light.

More and more, he’s seeing other homeowners in much smaller houses asking for smart systems, although on a lesser scale. We’re growing accustomed to being able to control devices from our smart phones, tablets, and Droids. Most of us already have TV remote control apps on our phones, for instance. It seems inevitable that we’d want to do things like easily monitor our alarm systems and adjust the heat and air from wherever we happen to be.

Ryan says there’s another benefit to the ELAN g! system. “Not only does the system make it easy to manage the large house, it also gives the parents easy access to see what their kids are watching and listening to, as well as to see who is coming and going through the surveillance cameras.”

And that, he says, could well be seen as the greatest asset of all.

Do South Magazine

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