Hundreds of homes in Ireland’s newest town are to be kitted out with the latest cabling systems for home technologies as part of a €500,000 deal awarded to Louth firm Smarthomes by Castlethorn Construction.
The deal will cover 400 houses in the Adamstown Castle development, part of the first phase of the new town at Adamstown.
The new urban district is located 10 miles from Dublin’s centre on the main Kildare rail line. A full range of transport, educational, shopping and social facilities were agreed upon before construction of the new town commenced.
Smarthomes will supply a specially designed advanced cabling system that will enable services from appointed providers Eircom, NTL and Magnet will be available to home owners through a single, centrally located control box in each house. The system is envisaged to future-proof the homes for decades in terms of communications such as broadband and digital television.
“This system will enable residents to access new technologies in each room of their homes when they move in,” explained Smarthomes chief executive Sean Gallagher. “The day is gone when frustrated home owners have to wait around for months for engineers to turn up to connect them to phone, broadband and television.”
“The great thing about the system is that it offers lifestyle flexibility to every house in Adamstown Castle. If you want to change the nursery into a home office in a few years all the technology is already in the room just waiting to be adapted without having to rip out walls and skirting boards,” he adds.
Dundalk-based Smarthomes focuses exclusively on the new build segment of the residential sector. Some 80,000 new housing units were completed in 2004 and projected growth stands at 500,000 units over the next 10 years.
Smarthomes employs 35 staff at a facility in Dundalk and Gallagher says the company is planning to expand based on plans to enter the Northern Ireland market.
“We recently established a sales force in the North which has 16,000 new house starts each year and we will be expanding into the UK in 2006 where 180,000 units are built each year,” he says.
By John Kennedy
CAPTION — Pirctured are Smarthomes directors Derek Roddy and Sean Gallagher
