Fun and Games on Home's 7 Consoles, 103" Plasma
By Lisa Montgomery
Video games proliferate, but Halo isn’t the only thing happening in this automated, kid-friendly house.

“Pat warned my kids that if they didn’t turn off their Xbox when they were finished, it would burn out,” says Janet Crown, the owner of a recently renovated 12,000-square-foot home in Los Angeles, Calif.

That’s Pat as in Patrick Calderone, who is the owner of Audio Video Experience (AVX), the custom electronics design and installation firm hired by Crown to rig her place with a variety of family-friendly electronic systems.



As the audio/video expert on the two-year project, his advice was taken seriously by Crown’s three grade-schoolers.

“If they’d remember to turn off the lights even one-tenth of the time that they remember to shut off their video games, we would be the most electrically efficient house in town,” she laments.

Parental Control
It would take more than conscientious use of the Xbox for Crown to feel completely at ease with the impact of technology on her kids. Her goal was to install a user-friendly, reasonably indestructible audio/video system that was simple to operate and that would network the TVs, video games and computers.

“I wanted this house to be a place where my kids could be kids, and not live in fear of breaking something if they touched it,” she says. “I also wanted to be able to monitor what they were watching, listening to or Googling.”

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