Seamless WiFi, wildlife-ready cameras, and an invisible install for a one-of-a-kind hillside home

An architectural masterpiece high in the hills needed better coverage without a single visible compromise to its design. Here's how we replaced a struggling WiFi, camera, and intercom setup with a full Ubiquiti ecosystem, without touching the home's architectural value.

The starting point: a beautiful home, an outdated network

This client's home sits high on a hillside, a genuine architectural showpiece with a flat roof and an unconventional, sculptural footprint — nothing about it is a basic square or rectangle. Before we arrived, WiFi was being handled by a single eero unit repeating a signal across a home far too large and far too complex in layout for one access point to cover. Security cameras were tied to an aging DVR system — the kind of setup that struggles with resolution, reliability, and remote access all at once — and gate entry ran on a legacy DoorKing system with no visitor video and no remote control.

The client had exceptionally high standards for the work, with one condition above all others: nothing we installed could impact or change the home's architectural and aesthetic value. Every cable, every mount, every access point had to disappear into the design, not sit on top of it.

Listening first: what the client actually cared about

During the consultation, two things became clear immediately. First, seamless WiFi was the top priority — coverage that simply worked in every room of a large, oddly-shaped home, with no dead zones and no manual switching between access points. Second, when we asked about cameras, the client mentioned something that stood out: the property sees frequent wildlife — deer, bobcats, and more — and they wanted a system that could actually capture and let them view that wildlife clearly, not just record grainy motion blur.

Between the demand for truly seamless, roaming WiFi across every room, a sculptural roofline that ruled out most conventional mounting approaches, and a desire for cameras sharp enough to identify wildlife at a distance, the direction was clear from that first conversation: this called for a full Ubiquiti ecosystem, not a mix of consumer-grade parts.

Before and after

Why Ubiquiti was the only real answer

Ubiquiti's UniFi ecosystem is one of the few platforms that could deliver on all three fronts at once: seamless, hardwired WiFi 7 performance across an unusually large and irregular floor plan, 4K cameras with on-device AI sharp enough to actually identify wildlife rather than just flag motion, and gate access hardware that integrates cleanly into one unified app instead of three disconnected systems. Every device — access points, cameras, the gate intercom, and the network switching gear — lives in the same UniFi Network and UniFi Protect apps, so the client (and our team, for future service) manages everything from one place.

An installation built for a home that doesn't play by the rules

A flat roof and a non-rectangular footprint meant there was no standard playbook for running cable across this property. We custom-installed roof conduit and roof conduit pipe supports across the entire roofline, using exact measurements and precisely drilled penetrations to stub conduit down through the roof to the ceiling below for every camera and access point — rather than surface-mounting cable runs where they'd be visible from the ground or from inside.

Every foot of cable on this job is direct-burial-rated, UV-rated CAT6, run through weatherproof flexible non-metallic conduit — the same standard we hold ourselves to on outdoor fire alarm and security runs, applied here to a residential network build. Roof penetrations were sealed with ChemCurb penetration seals to guarantee a watertight, long-term seal, and every junction point was fully weatherproofed with proper j-boxes, seals, and terminations rather than exposed splices.

The result: a network built to disappear visually while lasting for years, engineered with the same care as a commercial installation, on a home where the architecture itself was part of the brief.

What we installed

Three fully integrated systems, all on the same UniFi platform.

Built for the details this client cared about most

On the WiFi side, the Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro anchors the whole network, routing traffic to a Pro Max 24 PoE switch that powers every access point and camera over a single cable run each. A mix of U7 Pro (ceiling), U7 Pro Wall (wall-mounted), and U7 Outdoor / U7 Pro Outdoor units gives the property full WiFi 7 tri-band coverage indoors and out. Every access point that could be seen was fitted with a U7 Pro Paintable Cover, matched to the home's finish, so it blends into the wall or ceiling rather than standing out as visible hardware — directly answering the client's aesthetic requirement.

The G6 Turret cameras use a 1/1.8" 8MP sensor with 4K resolution and an on-device Multi-TOPS AI engine that runs face, vehicle, and animal detection locally — exactly the kind of detail-rich, reliable capture needed to actually identify wildlife moving across the property, not just trigger a generic motion alert. For the property's long sightlines, the AI PTZ Industrial camera adds pan-tilt-zoom reach that the fixed turrets can't cover alone, while the Device Bridge Pro and Device Bridge Pro Sector extend network connectivity wirelessly to structures too far or too impractical to run cable to directly.

At the gate, the old DoorKing system was retrofitted with a Ubiquiti Gate Hub and Intercom, complete with AI license plate recognition, giving the client the ability to see visitors live, issue temporary access codes, and manage entry remotely — capabilities the old phone-entry system never offered.

The results

This project is a good example of how we work: we listen closely before we ever propose a solution, and we design around what the client actually needs rather than what's easiest to install. The client told us two things mattered most — seamless WiFi and cameras that could truly capture the wildlife on their property — and every decision on this job traced back to those two priorities, down to the exact camera sensor and the placement of every access point.

We didn't stop at meeting the brief. We found a way to retrofit the client's outdated gate system into the same platform at no extra complexity, and delivered a result that's already exceeding expectations — clear, identifiable footage of deer, bobcats, and other wildlife, exactly the outcome the client asked for. Most importantly, the home's architectural and aesthetic value was fully preserved. The client's takeaway: a drastic improvement, a network built to last well into the future, and a genuinely happy homeowner.