Recognition & Credentials
Technology integration is difficult to judge from the outside. Every company shows attractive photographs and names the same brands. What distinguishes one from another is usually invisible until something has to work for ten years.
Independent recognition is one of the few external signals available, which is why we publish ours plainly — named projects, exact categories, and the detail needed to judge what each is worth.
At a glance
- 2020 — Prémio Projeto KNX, Prémios KNX Portugal. A national win, for Dunas Douradas Beach Villas, Almancil.
- 2019 — European Best Lighting Project, Control4 annual awards. For Lote 21, Alma do Mar, Lagos.
- 2018 — two honourable mentions, Prémios KNX Portugal: Prémio KNX and Prémio KNX Integrador, both for Seabreeze Residences, Dunas Douradas.
Two awarding bodies, three editions, one of them international. Each is described below, including what it is not.
KNX Portugal 2020 — Prémio Projeto KNX
iHome won the Prémio Projeto KNX at the Prémios KNX Portugal 2020, the Portuguese KNX Association’s national awards, for Dunas Douradas Beach Villas — a private development in the Algarve’s Golden Triangle, between Vale do Lobo and Quinta do Lago.
It is a national award, and it is a win rather than a nomination or a mention.
The KNX awards deserve explaining, because they are unlike most recognition in this industry. KNX is an open international standard, not a manufacturer’s product line. There is no vendor with an interest in the outcome, and no sales volume being rewarded. The jury assesses the engineering: how the system was designed, how it was programmed, and how well it serves the building it was built for. Three categories are awarded — Prémio KNX, Prémio Projeto KNX and Prémio Integrador KNX — and the Projeto category judges the installation itself, against the whole national field.
For a sense of the company that award keeps: in the preceding edition the same category went to a hospital in the Azores. These are not regional prizes handed out by territory. A private residential development in the Algarve was judged, nationally, to be the strongest KNX project of its year.
That year’s field was the largest the programme had seen — 47 entries, a record set despite a pandemic that postponed the ceremony by a full year. They were assessed by a five-person jury drawn largely from outside the trade: an architect, the director of ADENE (the Portuguese national energy agency), the editors of the magazines Anteprojectos and O Instalador, and the association’s Executive Secretary. The awards were presented on 22 October 2021 at the DECORHOTEL fair, at Lisbon’s FIL.
KNX Portugal 2018 — two honourable mentions
Two years before that win, at the programme’s first edition, iHome received two honourable mentions at the Prémios KNX Portugal 2018 — one in Prémio KNX and one in Prémio KNX Integrador. Both were for the same project, entered as Seabreezes by Dunas Douradas.
The building is Seabreeze Residences, at Dunas Douradas in Almancil: seven two- and three-bedroom apartments across two floors above basement parking, around 1,200 m² in all, completed in 2017 to a design by PLAN Associados.
The ceremony was held on 19 April 2018 at the Casa da América Latina in Lisbon. Twenty-six projects from seven companies were entered across the three categories, spanning industrial, commercial and residential buildings.
They are listed here because the pattern matters more than any single result, and because of where the pattern points. The 2018 mentions and the 2020 award are all at Dunas Douradas, in Almancil — the apartments in the programme’s first edition, the beach villas in its third. Being recognised repeatedly in the same national programme, in separate editions, in different categories and on different buildings, is harder to arrange than one good year — and consistency is the thing a client is actually buying.
These are recorded from the association’s own announcement of the results, circulated by its Executive Secretary on 21 April 2018. The association does not publish an archive of that edition on its website, which is also true of 2020, and is the reason this page exists in the detail it does.
Control4 2019 — European Best Lighting Project
At the Control4 annual awards for 2019, presented at Integrated Systems Europe, iHome received European Best Lighting Project for Lote 21, Alma do Mar, in Lagos.
It is worth being precise about what this award is, because award names in this industry are easy to conflate.
Control4 gives two kinds of recognition. Dealer of the Year is awarded per country, recognising a company’s overall commercial performance in its own market. Project awards — single room, whole-home, lighting, marine, commercial, hospitality — are judged on individual installations, across the whole regional dealer network, which numbers in the thousands and covers Europe, the Gulf and the Middle East.
Best Lighting Project is the second kind. It was not given for being the best in Portugal; it was given for a lighting design judged the strongest in the region.
Lighting is also a revealing category to win. A lighting installation cannot be rescued by expensive equipment. It depends on the circuits being planned before the walls close, on scenes that suit how people actually live rather than how they look in a demonstration, and on control that a guest can operate without being taught. It is the discipline where design decisions are most exposed and least forgiving.
The awarded project
Lote 21 sits on the clifftop at Alma do Mar, above the Atlantic at Lagos. iHome carried out the electrical design and the installation.
The photographs below are unusual for this industry, and deliberately so. Two show the finished house. The rest show the same house during construction — conduit and cable routes under the slab before the ceilings closed, first-fix boxes set before the screed, the structure going up. That earlier stage is where a lighting award is actually won or lost. By the time a house is photographed for a magazine, every decision that mattered has been buried in concrete.
The finished house
The same house during construction, before the ceilings closed
Site supervision and photography: NG Engenharia
Named projects, not logos
Every award on this page is attached to something specific: Dunas Douradas Beach Villas, Lote 21, Alma do Mar, and the company’s own integration practice. None was given for turnover, for territory, or for how much of a brand was purchased in a given year. Each was given for work, assessed by people who examined how it was built.
That distinction is worth carrying into any comparison you make. A great deal of what is presented as an award in this sector is a sales tier with a certificate attached.
Certifications and partnerships
We hold the credentials that matter for the platforms we deploy:
- Control4 — official dealer. Access to the full product line, dealer-level support, and technicians trained and certified by the manufacturer.
- KNX — certified partner. KNX is an open international standard rather than a proprietary system, and certification requires formal training and examination. It matters most for the client’s long-term position: a KNX installation is not dependent on a single company remaining in business, and can be maintained by any certified partner anywhere.
- CEDIA — member since 2019, and a founder member in Portugal. CEDIA is the international trade association for the home technology industry. It writes the design and installation standards this sector is measured against, and runs the training and certification behind them. iHome has held unbroken membership since 2019 and is one of its founder members in Portugal.
That last line deserves the same treatment as everything else on this page. Founding membership is not an award — nobody judged it, and it is listed here as a credential rather than among the awards above. What it records is commitment: unbroken membership since 2019 of the body that writes this industry’s standards, and a part in establishing its presence in Portugal. That is a different claim from having won something, and it is worth exactly what it is.
Published projects
The Portuguese KNX Association lists iHome among the integrators in its national project showcase, with a private gated development in the Algarve. Some of our work is shown on the projects page.
Twenty years in the Algarve
iHome has been designing and installing technology in Algarve properties since 2006 — private houses, developments and hospitality. That length of time is itself a credential in a sector where a great deal of equipment is sold by companies that will not be reachable when it needs attention.
It also means most of what we have installed is now old enough to have been tested. Systems commissioned a decade ago are still running and still supported, which is the only meaningful proof that the original decisions were sound.
What we would rather be judged on
Awards are useful, and they are not the point. The measures that matter to a client are duller and harder to photograph: whether the system still works in five years; whether it can be maintained without replacing everything; whether a guest can turn on a light without being shown how; and whether, when something does fail, it is diagnosed remotely and fixed the same week.
Those are the criteria we would ask anyone to compare us on — including against the recognition on this page.
See it working
Our showroom in Quinta do Lago has a full home cinema installation and integrated lighting, audio and control. Twenty minutes in a finished room settles questions that specifications cannot.
Call (+351) 289 090 900 or email geral@ihome.pt.