Taking a stylish lead in luxury home tech

A dash of serendipity took law student Katie Sparrevohn from the suit career she expected to founding a company that fits out London’s most expensive homes with £500,000 cinemas and £1 million tech systems.

“I was studying law, and temping during the holidays, when an agency sent me to work with a Danish builder, mostly making tea at first,” Sparrevohn explains of her convoluted passage to becoming an audio-visual (AV) entrepreneur. “Then the builder began working on a hotel in Italy, so he would disappear a lot, and I ended up learning a lot on the job — how to do pricing, project management, clients, until I was working on £10 million new-builds in Notting Hill.”

After graduating in 2001, Sparrevohn went travelling around Australia before finding work in City Hall in Ken Livingstone’s tenure. “I was there six months before the builder offered me a crazy amount of money to go back to him.”

There she met her now-husband, Mikkel, an electrician who had moved to the capital from Denmark, and the pair formed their own electrical business in 2004. “We were mostly fitting lighting, mains wiring, and alarms in ultra-prime homes in the capital, plus art gallery installations including at the Royal Academy of Arts. But it was boring — we saw the AV firms installing lots of fun stuff whilst we just had to put their cable in.”

Still, the electrics work grew and the duo were employing 35 staff until the 2008 financial crisis, when two major clients defaulted on “very large” payments. Sparrevohn, now 42, recalls: “It was really tough. We had two small children under the age of two and lost everything. We had to move house, and start again from scratch. It tested our resilience as entrepreneurs.”

But the Sparrevohns decided to start again in AV, fitting luxury home technology into clients’ homes. “It was — and is — huge houses: a recent project had 24 TVs, so we installed a plant room that sends Sky and Apple TV into every room and music into every speaker around the house. We put in automated blinds, lighting where one button turns off every bulb in the house; £500,000 cinemas with full surround sound and speaker — these are houses so big that if you don’t use technology, it’s hard to live there,” Sparrevohn adds, with perhaps the definition of “first world problem”.

“If you have seven different gates, you need to be able to close them all using one app, which will also have your heating, air conditioning, music, lighting, and blinds — we design all of that.” Their firms, London AV Solutions and Surrey AV Solutions, now work on 100 projects a year, with a further 100 contracts for after-care. Most clients are clustered around Mayfair, Belgravia, and Hampstead as well as private estates in Surrey.

Current projects include a £1 million deal to pack home tech wizardry into a two-storey apartment in Ascot for a crypto investor: “He is obsessed with tech, everything in the apartment is controlled by Google Voice, based on AI with routines set using Google Assistant; in the morning, for example, he is woken by his blinds rising and curtains opening in line with sunrise. We [are also installing] Dolby Atmos [sound technology], cinemas, TVs hidden in ceiling lifts, and eight zones of outside music on terraces.”

At another property in Mayfair, the firm is installing a 100-person commercial- grade nightclub. “Smoke machines and lasers, it’s in the basement next to a spa.”

The duo have never taken outside investment: “We had no start-up pot. We have had to make a profit and reinvest to grow. It has taken longer but we also have complete control over the company with no need to consult shareholders.”