Smart Electrical Features Sarasota Luxury Homeowners Are Adding Now | CoHarbor Electric

Walk through enough high-end custom homes in Sarasota and you start to notice a shift. It’s not just about the finishes anymore — the stone countertops and the imported tile and the Sub-Zero in the outdoor kitchen. The homeowners who are building or doing serious renovations right now are paying just as much attention to what’s behind the walls as what’s on them. The electrical infrastructure in a luxury home has gotten a lot more sophisticated, and the gap between a home that’s wired well and one that isn’t shows up fast once people move in and start living there.

We work on a lot of these projects across Sarasota, Bird Key, Siesta Key, Longboat Key, and down through Palmer Ranch and Lakewood Ranch. Custom builds, major remodels, waterfront properties that are being brought up to a completely different standard. And we’re having the same conversations over and over with homeowners about what they actually want their home to do — not just electrically, but as a living environment that responds to how they use it.

Here’s what we’re seeing requested most, and why it matters beyond just the novelty of it.

Whole-Home Automation That Actually Works

There’s a version of “smart home” that’s just a bunch of disconnected apps on your phone that kind of work sometimes. That’s not what we’re talking about. The luxury market here has moved well past that stage. What Sarasota homeowners are asking for now is integrated automation — lighting, climate, shading, security, audio, pool and spa, gate access — all talking to each other through a single platform that’s reliable and intuitive.

The platforms we see specified most on higher-end Sarasota builds are Lutron, Control4, Crestron, and Savant. Each has its strengths, and the right choice depends on the scope of the project and the homeowner’s priorities. But regardless of which platform gets chosen, the electrical infrastructure has to be designed to support it — and that means planning during rough-in, not retrofitting after the fact.

Centralized automation requires a structured wiring rack or tech closet, home-run low-voltage wiring to every room, and coordination between the electrical contractor and the AV integrator from early in the design phase. When that coordination happens well, the result is a system that works seamlessly. When it doesn’t — when electrical and AV are treated as separate scopes that figure it out later — you end up with workarounds and limitations that are expensive to fix after the walls are closed.

Lighting Control as the Foundation

Lighting control is usually the entry point for homeowners who are stepping into whole-home automation for the first time, and there’s a reason for that. The impact is immediate and visible every single day. Being able to set a “dinner” scene that dims the dining room, drops the kitchen to ambient, and turns on soft accent lighting through the butler’s pantry with one tap — that’s a different experience than walking around flipping switches.

Lutron’s Homeworks QS and RadioRA systems are the ones we install most often in Sarasota luxury homes. They’re rock solid, the keypads are beautiful, and the system integrates cleanly with other platforms. The wiring for a full Lutron system is different from standard switch wiring — every dimmer is a processor, not just a device — so the rough-in needs to account for that correctly.

Whole-Home Surge Protection

This one isn’t glamorous, but it’s important enough that we bring it up on every single custom build and significant remodel we do. Florida is one of the lightning capitals of the country. Sarasota gets hit. The barrier islands and waterfront properties can be particularly exposed.

A standard surge protector on your TV or your computer protects those individual devices. It does nothing for your panel, your HVAC system, your smart home processors, your EV charger, or any of the other expensive equipment that’s hardwired into your home. A whole-home surge protector installed at the main panel acts as the first line of defense, clamping surges before they can travel through the circuits.

On a luxury home with $30,000 in AV equipment, a $20,000 HVAC system, and a whole-home generator — the cost of a panel-level surge protector is trivial relative to what it’s protecting. We install them on every project we do now. It’s not an upgrade, it’s standard practice.

EV Charging Infrastructure

The number of homeowners asking about EV charging has gone from occasional to routine. Sarasota has a demographic that buys electric vehicles, and the luxury home buyers we work with often have two — sometimes with the expectation that they’ll have more in the future.

A proper EV charging installation for a luxury home isn’t just running a NEMA 14-50 outlet in the garage. It’s planning the dedicated circuit or circuits, sizing them correctly for the charger equipment specified, thinking about the electrical panel load and whether the current service handles it or whether the service needs to be upgraded, and planning for future charging needs if the garage has capacity for more than one vehicle.

Level 2 chargers — the kind that can fully charge most EVs overnight — typically need a dedicated 240-volt, 48-amp or 60-amp circuit. On a home with two EVs and a full suite of smart home equipment and a pool and outdoor kitchen, load planning matters. We’ve worked with homeowners who tried to add EV charging after the fact and discovered the panel was already close to capacity. Better to plan for it correctly the first time.

Future-Proofing the Garage

On new builds, we often run conduit for two or three EV charging circuits even if only one charger is being installed at move-in. The conduit is cheap at rough-in. Adding circuits later once the garage floor and walls are finished is not cheap. This is the kind of decision that saves homeowners real money down the road and takes about five minutes of thinking about during construction.

Automatic Standby Generators

This has become almost non-negotiable on Sarasota luxury builds, especially for waterfront homes and on the barrier islands. A whole-home standby generator on natural gas or propane senses a power outage and comes on automatically within seconds — the homeowner doesn’t need to do anything, doesn’t need to be home, doesn’t need to pull a portable generator out of the garage.

For a home with $10,000 in food in a Sub-Zero and a wine cellar and a whole-home automation system and guest quarters — sitting through a multi-day outage after a storm without power isn’t acceptable. We see 22kW, 24kW, and larger Generac and Kohler units specified on these projects. Liquid-cooled units for larger homes.

The electrical piece of a generator install involves the transfer switch — which automatically disconnects from utility power before connecting the generator, which is a safety requirement — the conduit and wiring runs, and the load calculation to confirm the generator is sized for what it needs to run. The mechanical piece is the gas line, which we coordinate with the plumbing or mechanical contractor.

Planning this during construction is straightforward. Retrofitting it into a finished home — running conduit through finished walls, working around landscaping and hardscape — is doable but significantly more involved. We always recommend planning for the generator during the build even if it’s being deferred as a future installation.

Motorized Shading Integration

This one overlaps between electrical and AV, and it’s something we’re wiring for on most high-end Sarasota builds now. Motorized shades — whether roller shades, drapery tracks, or exterior solar shades on a lanai — need wiring at each shade location or power bridges for multiple shades on the same run.

The integration piece is what makes it interesting. When your shading is connected to your lighting control system, you can program scenes that automatically adjust both together. The evening scene drops the shades, dims the interior lighting, turns on the pool lights. The morning scene raises the shades to a specific position based on the angle of the sun. For waterfront homes in Sarasota with significant western exposure, automated solar shades that respond to sun position aren’t just a luxury — they’re a meaningful energy management tool.

Lutron’s motorized shading integrates natively with their lighting control systems and with most major whole-home automation platforms. Wiring these systems correctly during rough-in is much cleaner than trying to integrate them later.

Whole-Home Audio and Visual

Distributed audio throughout the home — living areas, outdoor lanai, master bath, guest rooms — is a standard ask on Sarasota luxury builds. In-ceiling speakers, in-wall speakers, outdoor rated speakers around the pool deck. The electrical piece here is running the speaker wire, running HDMI or control wire to TV locations, and making sure there are power outlets and low-voltage boxes positioned correctly for every component.

Outdoor entertainment spaces particularly need attention. The lanai and pool area on a Sarasota luxury home often functions as a primary entertainment space — people entertain outside here more than they do in most other parts of the country. That means treating the outdoor audio and visual infrastructure as seriously as the interior.

Weatherproof outdoor TV locations need recessed outlets and properly rated enclosures. Speaker locations need wire runs back to the amplification source. Control panels or keypads at the outdoor bar or in the outdoor kitchen need low-voltage boxes and possibly conduit pathways for control wiring. None of this happens without planning.

Lighting Design Beyond Just Fixtures

This is an area where good electrical planning adds something that most homeowners don’t fully anticipate when they’re in the design phase. Architectural lighting — cove lighting, under-cabinet LED strip systems, stair tread lighting, artwork accent lighting — needs to be designed and wired for specifically. It’s not something you can fully add after the fact.

LED strip lighting in particular requires planning. The strips run on low voltage, powered by LED drivers that need to be located somewhere accessible and wired to line voltage. If that’s figured out during rough-in, the driver locations are clean and the runs are short. If it’s figured out after drywall is up, there’s always a compromise somewhere.

Color temperature matters here too. Luxury home lighting design typically specifies warmer color temperatures — 2700K to 3000K — to create the right ambiance for living spaces. Getting that right means specifying the fixtures and LED systems correctly from the start, not mixing color temperatures because different things got ordered at different times.

Panel Design for a Home That Does a Lot

All of these features — the automation system, the EV charging, the generator, the motorized shading, the outdoor kitchen, the pool and spa, the distributed audio, the HVAC loads — add up to a significant electrical demand. Getting the panel design right is the foundation everything else sits on.

On a full luxury build in Sarasota we’re almost always working with 400-amp service, often with multiple subpanels — one for the main house, one for the garage, one for pool and outdoor equipment. The subpanel layout matters for wire run efficiency and for keeping circuit categories organized and manageable.

Proper labeling, panel schedules that are accurate and readable, surge protection at the main panel and subpanels — this is what separates a panel that a homeowner can understand and work with from a panel that’s a black box nobody wants to open.

Ready to Build It Right? Call Coharbor Electric.

If you’re building or renovating a luxury home in Sarasota, Longboat Key, Bird Key, Palmer Ranch, or anywhere across Southwest Florida, the electrical planning conversation needs to happen early. Not at rough-in. During design.

Coharbor Electric works on custom builds and high-end residential projects throughout the Sarasota market. We know what these homes need, we know what the climate does to electrical systems here, and we know how to coordinate with builders, architects, and AV integrators to make sure the electrical scope supports the whole project — not just the bare minimum.

Call us or reach out through our website to talk through your project. We’re happy to review plans, walk through load requirements, and help you think through the features you want so they’re built in correctly from day one.