‘Its resonated incredibly well’ – Townhouse Design on Zuma.

For luxury kitchen design showrooms like Townhouse Design, delivering ‘exceptional’ is a must. Based in Harrogate, Yorkshire, Townhouse Design specialise in bringing their client’s boutique kitchen dreams to life – utilising leading contemporary brands to create beautiful kitchen spaces that meet the demanding expectations of the modern home.

For Townhouse Design, Zuma represents a powerful upsell opportunity. Zuma helps to further deliver their concept of distinctly personalised kitchen designs, whilst introducing leading-edge concepts.

When we heard about a recent, large scale project involving 27 individual Zuma units in a multi-room, multi-use space, we knew we had to talk to the team at Townhouse Design, and find out more. So we sat down with Design Manager Jonathan Bowskill, to dive into this incredible home renovation, and dig deeper into the role Zuma played in bringing the client’s vision to life.

TOWNHOUSE DESIGN – 20 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE

Located in the handsome suburb of Montpellier, Townhouse Design has been delivering stunning kitchens to clients in Harrogate for twenty years. In this time, they’ve established a five-star reputation for carefully curated quality – creating kitchen designs built around the needs of the individual. There’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach at Townhouse Design. Every kitchen concept is unique to the requirements of its space and prospective owners. This much is clear from the moment you step foot through the door of their beautiful showroom. 

Set throughout a double-fronted Victorian townhouse, Townhouse Design’s demonstration space is a perfect example of how to present boutique, contemporary kitchen interiors in a classically designed space. Beautiful bay windows and high ceilings showcase to clients that it’s perfectly possible to mix period housing with contemporary design – with leading German kitchen brand Leicht making up the lion’s share of the simple yet stylish hardware on display. 

Integrated into this simple and stylish setting is a relatively modest Zuma demonstration system. ‘We have four Zuma Lumisonic speaker lights in quite a large space,’ Jonathan tells us. ‘Even despite the fact they’re in an area with quite a high ceiling, those four speakers really do fill the space with sound…it’s a very rich sound. It compliments the architecture of our building and people really like it.’

The team at Townhouse Design first encountered Zuma when it was recommended by another showroom in South Yorkshire. ‘It [sound] was relatively untested in our showroom…but we put it in and its resonated incredibly well with our clients’. 

TOWNHOUSE DESIGN & ZUMA

‘When people are buying a higher end kitchen,’ Jonathan explains, ‘…they’re often looking for more than just a kitchen, it’s a whole floor-to-ceiling project. Maybe they’re extending, or they’ve just moved into a new house and they’re knocking it around quite a bit…what that means is they’re willing to think about other things like furniture, decoration, and even infrastructure like the lighting and the sound. That’s where Zuma becomes potentially really valuable to them’. 

The Townhouse Design team truly sees the potential in Zuma for their clients. So much so that Zuma is presented as a value-add on every quote that Townhouse Design produces. ‘Every single quote that we do includes a piece at the bottom on the benefits of a Zuma setup. The first meeting we have with the client is where they’re presented with the costing, and we’re discussing kitchen specifics. Zuma is this exciting ‘nice to have’ that we can introduce at the end of that process’. 

“This year people are more cost conscious than they’ve ever been, even if they don’t have to be!” Jonathan explains. “…What we try to do is present a beautiful kitchen and then how it can be enhanced even further with a product like Zuma.”

But this doesn’t mean products like Zuma are in any way an afterthought. The modern kitchen is meant to be much more than a place to cook dinner – and a whole new generation of upwardly mobile homeowners recognises the importance of quality sound in the kitchen space for entertaining, study, working from home, and more. Jonathan agrees. 

“The reality is, when someone is in the process of a fairly major project with their house…if they were already of the mindset of thinking about an integrated audio system, like Sonos for instance, then they’re already talking about spending that money. With Zuma, all we are doing is talking about spending it in a different way, in a solution that is better looking than Sonos, and is much more future-proofed.’

That latter point is crucial. When clients are spending in excess of £60k on a new kitchen renovation, they want to know their sound and light is set to go the distance, and last as long as the kitchen itself. With Zuma – designed to last 12-15 years at full capacity and with every element software upgradeable – that staying-power is factored in from the moment the installation comes to completion. 

27 ZUMA’S – ONE INSTALLATION

One recent Townhouse Design installation in particular shows the power and potential of Zuma in the modern home. Relocating from a different area, Jonathan’s clients allocated significant funds to invest into property renovation. ‘The kitchen had been put in about ten years ago, but it didn’t really feel like it was to the same level of quality as the rest of the house,’ Jonathan explains. The couple approached Townhouse Design and tasked them with overseeing the design for an incredible new open plan living space.

“They came to us and really liked our offering. Their chosen design happily met their budget aspirations, so their next question was ‘what else can we do?’. This was when Zuma was suggested”. A large-scale kitchen/living room/diner was further expanded with the removal of an internal wall to create one, expansive, open plan living space across a large proportion of the ground floor. This is where granular sound and light control became crucial to the design success of the project.

“They now had this big kitchen/diner area, as well as a pool room, and bar, all in the same open plan space.” Jonathan tells us. Its multi-room, multi-zone technology therefore made Zuma a near-perfect fit for this incredible new space – allowing the client to easily isolate and control audio in each area of the room with the tap of a button. “One of the nice things about the Zuma app is that you can select just to play music in a certain area,” Jonathan adds, “…so if the kids have some friends round and they’re playing pool…they can just have the music on there rather than in the kitchen below the parent’s bedroom.”.

Zuma’s design flexibility also meant it could be employed in arrays of different sizes for each individual zone, depending on the specific needs of that particular area. Jonathan takes us through the internal layout in more detail. “The bar and the pool room area are mostly about ambience, so there’s just a couple of units in these spaces…it’s in the living room area that they’ve centred most of the speakers, and created this really immersive space for entertainment and watching movies”. 

Paired with a television, Zuma becomes a powerful and deeply engaging home entertainment system, and Townhouse Design’s installation represents a perfect example of this. It caps off an absolutely stunning example of how Zuma can be utilised to cater to the specific needs of each individual living space – even where there are no physical walls to separate these living spaces from one another.

ELEVATED DESIGN & THE ULTIMATE UPSELL

“The previous owners of the home had built this large space that wasn’t particularly stylish. Our clients were all about creating a stylish space”. Jonathan knew Zuma offered a unique selling point for design conscious clients – its ability to reduce the volume of visible tech on display in the home. “When we were having a conversation about reducing the amount of ceiling acne…the amount of stuff that clutters and breaks up the clean lines of the ceiling…that really resonated with them”.

Zuma’s ease of use was also key – a value add that offered a crucial point of difference to the legacy system they had inherited from the previous owners. Jonathan explains. “‘They inherited a Sonos system that was already in the house, but they weren’t all that comfortable using it…they had this big, complicated amp in a cupboard that they didn’t really understand…so the system that they inherited had no real value to them”. Zuma, therefore, represented a refreshingly simple alternative to this existing system, with very little standing in the way of them utilising its sound and light on a daily basis. 

All of this might make Zuma seem like a foregone conclusion for the client – that they would have come to their initial consultation looking for a solution that fitted their needs. But this wasn’t actually the case. “They weren’t looking for a sound solution when they came in to see us…it was a fairly big ‘nice to have’ on top of the original quote.” A five-figure value-add means Zuma represents a significant upsell for the Townhouse Design team, and relieves a huge paint point for the client – making their house more livable and enjoyable in the process. 

WORKING WITH ZUMA

The Zuma team were only too happy to help Jonathan and his team design and specify the system required for their client’s incredible installation. “We sent Zuma a room plan, and they gave us a suggestion of where the Zuma system should go.” Jonathan reveals. “We sent this onto the client who swapped a few Lumisonic (speaker lights) for Luminaire (light-only units), which is of course a very easy thing you can do with this product.”. 

That wasn’t all. The Zuma team then visited the client after install on two occasions – first to set up the system and give the client a tutorial in how to operate the system via the Zuma app. Then, they returned to the client’s home a few months later after the home WiFi was swapped out for a new system, and ensured Zuma connected properly with the updated network. “Zuma really did go above and beyond in that respect”, Jonathan says.

So, given their experience, would Jonathan recommend Zuma to other showrooms? “Absolutely,” he concludes. “If you’re the right kind of showroom, Zuma will be a really nice fit for your clients, no question”.

–

Interested in stocking Zuma? Contact us on the form below and book a free, no-obligation demo with our team today!