How we vet the products that go in your home.
A customer hires us because we are supposed to know things they do not know yet. That is the job. If I am not bringing that judgment to the product list, I am not giving you what you paid for. I am giving you an order-taker with a logo on the truck.
This page is the standard we run on. It came out of a job that did not work. I am keeping it short and direct. Rules that are not short and direct do not survive contact with a real jobsite.
We live with it first.
If we have not lived with it, it does not go in your home.
I run Crestron in every square inch of my own house. Every room. Every scene. Every edge case. That is how I know what it does, what it does not do, and where it gets weird. I eat my own dog food.
A spec sheet is not a substitute for living with a product. A demo is not a substitute. A manufacturer's word is not a substitute. The only thing that tells the truth about a product is using it, the way a homeowner would use it, long enough to see how it ages.
What that means for you. If we have not lived with it, we are not putting it in your house. If you ask for a platform we have not vetted, we will tell you. We will do the homework. We will come back with what we learned. Then you decide. If we trust the manufacturer's word over our own experience, we are setting up a recipe for disaster. I have already learned that one. I am not learning it again.
The manufacturer has to stand with us.
If they will not pick up the phone when something goes wrong, the product is not in your home.
Every product has a bad day. The bad day is not the test. The test is what happens on the bad day. When I escalate a real issue, the right answer from the factory is to take it seriously. The wrong answer is to suggest the customer is wrong, or that the user is talking to the product wrong.
I have heard the wrong answer. I have heard it more than once on the same job. I will not hear it on a job again.
What that means for you. Before a brand goes on a Restrepo proposal, we have already pushed them on a real escalation. We know how their support actually behaves, not how the brochure says it behaves. If a manufacturer treats us like the problem when we bring them a problem, they do not get to be in your home.
Privacy has to be defensible out loud.
Audio that could be played back later should not exist in the first place.
If a product has a microphone, I want to know what it captures, when it captures it, and where it goes. The honest answer is fine. The dodge is the problem.
If I cannot stand in a homeowner's kitchen and explain the privacy posture of a device in plain language, the device is not going in the kitchen. Or anywhere else in the home. There is no configuration tweak that makes a privacy failure acceptable. There is no manufacturer reply that lands the right way. My heart dropped the day I learned that lesson. That is not a feeling I am willing to put a homeowner near again.
What that means for you. Anything in your house with a microphone has already been through that question. If we cannot defend it, we do not put it in. If we used to put it in and the answer later changed, we stop. Integrity always must come first, even when it hurts.
It has to age.
Month one is easy. Year three is the test.
A product that works on the bench is the start. A product that works after a power cycle at three in the morning, after a firmware update, after the homeowner uses it in a way the engineer did not predict, that is the bar. We watch how a product behaves in the third year, not in the first week.
We have been doing this for over twenty years. We know which categories age well. We know which ones get worse with every update. We know which ones get quietly abandoned by their own manufacturer two years after the press release. That history is in the proposal whether you see it or not.
What that means for you. The systems we put in are systems we expect to be supporting a decade from now. If a product is unlikely to make it to year three in good shape, we say so. We would rather put in a quieter product that lasts than a flashier one that dies at month eighteen.
We own the jobsite.
If we do not own the process, we do not take the job.
How decisions get made. How we communicate. How disagreements get resolved. How scope changes get priced and approved. Who signs off on what before the next phase starts. None of that is up for negotiation. That is the integrator's discipline. A client who does not want me to bring my process is not asking for an integrator. They are asking for a vendor. They are not the same job.
I learned this the hard way. I let someone else's process run a job once. The product list got dictated to me. The cadence got dictated to me. Two years later I had lost the customer. The lesson was not on them. The lesson was on me, for taking a job I was not going to be allowed to actually run.
What that means for you. When we take a project, we run it. That includes the right to say no on a product. The right to slow down a phase that is not ready. The right to push back when a decision early in the build is going to cause a problem at the punch list. We own our jobsites. You are paying for that judgment. Letting us use it is the deal.
What we have stopped using.
This is the part of the standard most people leave off the website. It is the part that matters.
A vetting standard with no list of products you walked away from is a marketing page. The proof of the standard is what you stopped using when the standard told you to.
A consumer voice platform we put in a luxury home.
We removed it. We fired the manufacturer. We handed the voice scope to another integrator. We were not going to keep being a guinea pig for a brand that would not stand with us. We were not going to keep doing R&D for their product, in our customer's home, on our customer's time. The full story is here: The Two-Year Job.
What changed because of that job: every microphone product is now vetted on Criterion 03 before anything else. If we cannot defend the privacy posture in plain language, the brand does not get a second look.
Hardware brands that quietly stopped showing up.
We do not name them on the public web. Some of them are still around in name. We name them in person when a client asks why we did not pick a product that looks cheaper on paper. Cheaper on paper, with no support behind it, is the most expensive product in the room.
Demos that do not survive contact with a real home.
If a category only behaves correctly in a controlled showroom, it is not a real category yet. We have specified out of more than one product family because the gap between the demo and the lived experience was too wide. We will revisit them when the gap closes. Some of them have. Some of them have not.
Our standing pledge.
People buy Restrepo sites. Not the manufacturers that are inside of them.
If something we put in your home does not behave the way we said it would, we own it. We come back. We make it right. We do that whether the manufacturer is helping us or not. That is the deal.
Integrity always must come first, even when it hurts. People need to believe we will do the right thing even when no one is paying attention. That is one of the core pillars we stand on.
I will tell you the truth even when it is uncomfortable. Especially then.
. Mike Restrepo
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Twenty minutes on the phone. We will tell you, on the phone, whether we are right for the project. If we are not, we will tell you who is. NJ · CT · NY.