CEDIA Smart Home Awards 2026: The Americas Winners Are In
CEDIA announced the winners of its Smart Home Awards Americas on 8 September, at a ceremony in Denver's Mile High Ballroom during CEDIA Expo week. We covered the global picture in our world's best smart homes feature earlier this month — this is the second wave of results, and it settles a few things about where residential technology is actually heading.
The story of the night: one house, three podiums
HAAS Home Technologies' Casa de Verano, a Texas summer residence, took Best Integrated Home Level III, won the Technology Meets Design category, and picked up an honourable mention in Home Cinema Level II. Three results for a single project is rare at these awards. It had already taken silver at CE Pro's separate Home of the Year Awards for a theatre north of US$100,000 — a different awards program, worth keeping straight, but the same house.
What makes Casa de Verano interesting is not the equipment list, which hasn't been published. It's the category it won: Technology Meets Design. The judges' point, and ours for years, is that the best automation is the kind guests never notice. Lighting, climate, audio, security and a dedicated cinema — present everywhere, visible nowhere.
The winner that matters more than the mansions
Best Integrated Home Level I went to Lima Sound Contractors for Apartment T — an apartment, in Peru. It stood on the same stage as a multi-award-winning Texas estate, and that contrast is the most useful thing in the whole winners list. Award-grade automation is not a floor-size question. A well-designed apartment system and a 20-room estate are judged on the same things: how well the system fits the way the household lives, and how little it demands attention.
If you live in a Sydney apartment and have assumed this category of work isn't for you, Apartment T is the counter-example.
The rest of the winners
- Best Integrated Home Level II: SmartTouchUSA, "Washington DC Home with a Voice" — a whole-home voice control project. Honourable mention: Petrone Technology Group, "Edge Theory".
- Home Cinema Level I: Casaplex, "Sunset Lounge".
- Home Cinema Level II: Audio Images, "Pinnacle Cinema", with an honourable mention for their "Avalon Cinema".
- Technology Beyond the Home: Petrone Technology Group for the National Polo Center.
- Lifetime Achievement: Peter Lyngdorf — a name anyone who cares about audio will recognise.
What the 2026 winners have in common
Reading across both this list and the international winners, three threads keep repeating.
Design integration beat spectacle. The awards that used to go to the biggest video wall now go to the house where you can't find the speakers. That matches what our clients ask for: technology that serves the architecture rather than competing with it.
Voice earned its place. A Level II win for a voice-first home says voice control has moved from novelty to genuinely useful — when it's programmed properly, room by room, rather than bolted on.
Scale stopped mattering. From a Peruvian apartment to a Texas estate, the judging rewarded fit, not size.
The honest note
Per-project technical details are limited to what the trade press has published, and full equipment lists generally aren't public — so treat any article claiming to know exactly what's inside these homes with suspicion. What is public is the standard they set. If you want to see what award-calibre thinking looks like applied to Sydney homes, our local project write-ups are the closest thing to a tour, and our CEDIA Expo preview covers the technology behind this year's entries.
Thinking about what a properly integrated system would look like in your own home — at any scale? Book a consultation and we'll have that conversation without the awards-night gloss.
