The best control system is the one nobody sees.
You spend months resolving a wall: the proportion of the opening, the shadow gap, the one material that carries the room. Then a bank of switches arrives. KNX with Casient Keystone is how a villa, a luxury home or a boutique hotel gets its automation without giving up the elevation.
Draw the room, not the controls.
Most systems ask the owner to operate the building. Every light, blind and zone wants its own switch, keypad or screen, and the architect ends up negotiating their positions on every elevation.
Casient starts from the other end. It understands rooms, devices and what each can do, and every kind of room comes with prewritten, reviewed behaviours. The room responds to people; the wall stays quiet. When the owner does want something, they ask the house in plain language instead of reaching for a panel. Presence takes the place of a switch only where the design wants it to; wherever you draw a plate, it stays.
Fewer switches
Presence does the work in bathrooms, hallways and ensuites. The plates that remain are the ones you chose to draw.
Fewer panels
Owners ask the house what it’s set up to do, and why it did something, without reading a manual or finding a screen.
One rack, out of sight
Casient Keystone sits in the rack and joins the commissioned bus. Nothing about it needs to appear in a room.
Behaviour that holds
Rooms keep their limits. While Keystone is running, a generic command or scene does not light a child’s bedroom after dark; ask for the room by name and it lights. The lighting design survives the owner’s worst moment.
You specify the finishes. Casient decides how the room behaves.
KNX is an open standard, and Casient replaces no KNX device and favours no brand. The luminaire, the blind motor, the curtain track, the heating zone and the switch plate remain your choices, made for how they look and feel. Casient decides how a room behaves within limits your integrator sets.
Say what you want. The integrator approves it.
“Keep the guest bathroom floor warm only when someone is staying in bedroom 3.”
Casient drafts it. Fixed code checks it against the building and its safety limits, and shows the integrator what will change.
No new rule goes live until they say so. Every change is logged, so the design intent is on record and the building can be asked why it did something.
Life safety is not a design variable.
Emergency lighting (AS 2293), fire detection (AS 1670), egress and access control stay with their own certified systems, and Casient never controls them. Safety logic stays on the KNX bus. In commercial buildings Casient doesn’t control locks or access at all, and nothing that unlocks or opens acts on a single sensor.
The same behaviours in every building.
Room behaviours carry across buildings, so the second villa is not a new script. For the owner, a log of every decision means a question like “why did the ensuite light stay on at 2 a.m.?” has an answer instead of a shrug.
The integrator hands over a pack generated from the project, under their name, and looks after the building afterwards. You are not asked to take a position on who supports it; the relationship stays between your client and the firm you chose.
Specifying a hotel, or a larger building with a BMS? Talk to us first. We will say plainly what Casient does and doesn’t cover.
Five things to settle with the integrator early.
- 01Where the walls stay switchless, and where one considered plate is wanted.
- 02Where presence sensing sits in each room, so it is planned into the ceiling rather than added to it.
- 03The pockets, tracks and motors for blinds and curtains, drawn into the joinery from the start.
- 04Where the rack lives, so Keystone and the commissioned bus have a home that is out of sight and reachable.
- 05Which rooms need their own behaviour, such as a bedroom that must stay low after dark.
Designing one now?
Tell us about the project and we will talk it through the way you would with a joiner: honestly, early, and with the drawings open. Your questions go straight to Ted, not a sales team.