How much does home automation cost for a villa in Dubai?

Search this question and you will find two kinds of answer. One is a low figure in an advert, which often buys one system in a few rooms, with the rest of the villa added later, one upgrade at a time. The other is a paragraph insisting that every home is unique, followed by a form. Neither tells you what your villa will cost. This article explains how a complete villa is priced, what moves the number, and how to get your own figure before you commit to anything.

The short answer

A villa does not need home automation on its own. It needs six systems: automation, WiFi, CCTV, intercom, door access and audio. Each is priced from the parts its design calls for, and each has its own subtotal on the bill. On top of that comes the installer's work, the wiring, installation, programming and commissioning, which your installer quotes separately. The honest answer is the sum of those six subtotals plus the installer's quote, and the five choices below decide most of it.

We do not quote a typical figure. Two villas with the same number of bedrooms can differ by a third in ELV, and a figure that fits neither tells you nothing. The pricing page shows how each system is priced, and your own bill arrives in hours.

What the price includes

Our bill covers the hardware at MSRP, system by system: the actuators, dimmers and power supplies in the distribution boards, the sensors, the room screens, the access points, switch and rack, the cameras and recorder, the door station and lock, and the amplifiers and speakers. It also covers the engineering, which means the design, the three document sets for the client, the contractor and the project engineer, the review, and any changes. Every price on the bill includes 5% VAT.

What the price leaves out

It does not include wiring, conduit and containment, or installation, programming and commissioning, all of which belong to the installer, who works from our documents and invoices you separately. On a typical villa the installer's side is a meaningful fraction of the hardware side, so ask for that figure before you sign anything with anyone.

The wall switches are not in the number either. On our bills the switch line reads AED 0, because you keep your own switch series and we make it part of the system from behind the wall. Here is how that works.

Five things that move the price, in order

1. Lighting circuits, and whether they dim. Every circuit takes one channel in the board. A switched circuit uses a relay channel, while a dimmed circuit uses a dimmer channel, which costs considerably more per circuit. We design to one circuit per fixture type per zone, so the chandelier, the downlights and the cove in a majlis are three circuits, because nobody wants them on one switch. Our default is on/off everywhere except the cinema. If you want dimming in the living spaces, say so room by room, and the bill will show you what each room's dimming costs.

2. Room screens. A room screen is the thermostat and the scene panel in one, and the large screens on the main living floors answer the intercom as well. A screen is also among the costliest devices on any wall, and a screen that is not the room's thermostat is usually a screen nobody uses. We put screens where someone stands and uses them, and we never put a second climate plate beside one.

3. Cameras and recording. The ring of cameras around the perimeter is the design, with four to ten cameras depending on the plot. Indoor cameras come only on request, and never by default in bedrooms, bathrooms, dressing rooms or staff quarters. Recording is 31 days by default, which is what sizes the recorder and its drives, so more cameras and more days mean more storage.

4. Audio zones. You get none you did not ask for. Each zone has its own speakers and its own amplification in the rack, and a villa with two zones is a different house from one with eight.

5. Floor area, for the WiFi. We design roughly one wired access point per 100 square metres, cover every room including the staff rooms, and add one shared outdoor point for the terrace and pool. A larger villa means more points and a bigger switch.

Presence sensors, curtain motors and door locks tend to move the number less than people expect. Curtains are added opening by opening, so ask us for the figure per opening and count your windows.

What does not move the price

The brand does not. Each tier resolves to one validated hardware stack, and the design is the same whichever stack builds it. KNX is an open standard with hundreds of manufacturers behind it, so a villa never depends on any single one of them. Brand names appear in the proposal rather than on the quantity lines, and a logo is never a reason for a number to go up.

How to get the number for your villa

Send the floor plans on WhatsApp and answer the questions about how you live: which rooms dim, which get a screen, where the cameras look. The bill comes back within hours, room by room, with the reason for every line, and at that stage it costs you nothing. If a fit-out company is already handling your villa, we work through them, and the same bill arrives in their account.