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It may exude Old World Spanish charm, but Herman Cardenas' 6,000-square-foot Austin, Texas, hacienda lives and breathes 21st-century technology. Touch the framed photograph in the foyer and it turns into a control panel. That mirror inside the walk-in shower? It's really an LCD TV.

"The old world is what you see; the new world is hidden," says Cardenas, a former custom home builder who's now chairman of NetStreams. His home theater, for example, is beyond state of the art, but the doors leading in were first hung on a Spanish temple more than 400 years ago.

Not surprisingly, Cardenas uses his own company's IP-based networking products to connect his home's entertainment, lighting, HVAC, and security systems (so does Exceptional Innovation's Seale Moorer; see sidebar). When his son plugs an iPod into the kitchen's iPort, he can hear it in any of the home's 22 audio zones.

"Six or seven years ago, when I showed the first IP-connected speakers, the speaker manufacturers all laughed," says Cardenas. "They're not laughing anymore."

But keeping all the technology out of sight was a challenge, says Joel Biggerstaff, president of Biggerstaff Audio Video and Lighting Control, which handled the install. To prevent home theater noise from leaking out into the rest of the house, Biggerstaff's crew put each of the 12 Polk IP speakers in a performance enclosure, doubled the room's insulation, installed rubber floaters in the floor trusses, and used Z channels to separate the drywall from the house's frame. To get the shower LCD flush with the mirror, they had to disassemble the display, grind parts of it down, and reassemble it, then cut an access panel into the closet behind the bath so they could get at the electronics.

Other challenges? Pulling more than five miles of bundled Cat-5 wire and dealing with the oppressive Texas heat, says Biggerstaff, whose crew completed the job in summer 2006. "We had to take 'humidity breaks' throughout the job."

SNAPSHOT

• Crowson Home Theater Motion Actuators
• Elo 17-inch built-in touch screen
• Fujitsu and Samsung plasma TVs
• GE NetworX security system
• Lutron HomeWorks Lighting System
• Marantz DLP 1080P Projector
• NetStreams ControLinX
• NetStreams DoorLinX doorbell interface with intercom
• NetStreams KeyLinX 10-button keypads
• NetStreams MediaLinX Pro audio converter and control
• NetStreams PowerLinX power supplies
• NetStreams Streaming Music Manager
• NetStreams SwitchLinX Ethernet switch
• NetStreams TouchLinX LCD touch screens
• Panasonic IP cameras
• Parasound ZTuner
• Polk Audio IP speakers, subwoofers, and amplifiers
• Samsung Q1 Wireless Mobile PC tablets
• Sharp Aquos LCD TVs
• Stewart Filmscreen CinCurve with Masking

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WOW: Living the Digital Life

Like NetStreams' Herman Cardenas, Exceptional Innovation's Seale Moorer isn't just the CEO of a home automation company, he's also a customer. His 12,000-square-foot Woodland Hall home outside Columbus, Ohio, includes, among other things, three XBox 360s, five wireless access points, six PCs, 12 Hewlett-Packard digital entertainment centers, 15 TVs, 19 thermostats, 22 security cameras, 36 audio zones, 120 security sensors, and 397 lighting zones. All of it is integrated and controlled by EI's LifeWare software.

The home features Vantage lighting controls downstairs and Insteon upstairs -- just to demonstrate that LifeWare can integrate both, says installer Kevin Morgan, who now works for EI. "The quantity of wiring involved in that home was amazing-just miles and miles of it," he says. It even has unused fiber optic lines for the day more bandwidth becomes necessary.

And the job's never over. Morgan and crew are busy swapping out the home's Media Center PCs to upgrade from Windows XP to Vista. Some digital homeowners are never satisfied with the status quo.