The Great Outdoors Is More Fun with Your Favorite Entertainment

As spring rolls into the Chicagoland area, it's time to shed winter's heavy coats and accouterments and enjoy a little more time outside. And this is the time you might be looking at adding something to make your outdoor areas at home more inviting and entertaining in the warmer months.

Whether you are looking to extend the patio, build a fireplace, add a pool, or renovate the landscape, may we suggest that all of these go better with audio and video entertainment. Bringing music, movies, shows, and other pastimes outdoors will help you make the most of your outdoor investment and spend more time outside. Keep reading below to see how outdoor audio and video add the crowning touch to all the alfresco activities in your Naperville home.

Style and Substance Combine to Perfection with Lutron Keypads

As a design professional, you understand both form and function. Many things in homes need to deliver on everyday functionality and achieve that without sacrificing aesthetics. Lighting is one area where you need to add functional illumination and do it in a welcoming, aesthetically pleasing way.

Let's continue the discussion about lighting but focus on how it's controlled. The lowly light switch is functional, but even adding a dash of color to Decora doesn't make them beautiful. Worse, the many lights in your high-end projects can sometimes result in "wall acne," where there are too many banks of switches in the room. Is there a solution to this unfortunate triumph of function over form? Yes, if you incorporate Lutron lighting control and their elegant keypad controls in your Chicago projects. Keep reading below to learn more about two of Lutron’s most elegant – and smart – keypad lines.

Our New Lighting Demo Space Helps You Visualize The Impact of Lighting Choices and Control

Lighting design is both an art and a science. There are guidelines, rules, and skills that professional lighting designers use to add functional illumination to a space and make it aesthetically pleasing. If you are an interior or lighting designer, architect, or builder, you have an eye and experience in how lighting affects your projects.

Barrett’s Technology Solutions is not a lighting designer, but we do offer lighting installation and control solutions for the Chicago area and Lake Geneva, WI, clients. We aim to partner with design and build professionals to show you what's possible with the latest LED lighting and control solutions. To that end, we are excited to announce our new Lighting Lab – a place you and your clients can visualize and experience some of the latest lighting technology and how you might use that in your projects.

Please continue reading below to learn more about what you can experience in our new Chicago lighting lab!

Build a Dedicated Media Room as an Entertainment and Fun Hub

TVs were once these big, bulky things that demanded their own focal point in a room. Do you remember the large-screen TVs of the mid-2000s? Rear projection 50-inch-and-up models came in huge heavy cabinets that competed with fireplaces in your living or family room. And while those TVs had arguably better speakers than today's flat panels, that didn't include the sound system!

As we all know, times have changed. Today's sleek flat-panel TVs can mount on a wall and go anywhere – even above the fireplace with no room-focal redesign needed! And the soundbar didn't exist years ago, which offers a sleeker, slimmer approach to better sound from the TV. But if you have such a setup in your family or living room, does that make it your media room? If that’s what you want to call it, we won’t argue with you. But we will suggest that a media room installation is more than a TV and a soundbar.

Read on below to see how you can create a media entertainment hub in your family room, basement rec room, or whatever space you choose in your Chicago, IL home.