Villa CCTV starts at the boundary, not inside the house

Most people picture CCTV as a camera in the corner of a room, quietly watching whoever walks past. A well-designed villa works the other way round: the cameras stand at the edge of the plot and look outwards, and the house itself stays private unless you decide otherwise. Here is how we design that ring, how many cameras it takes and how long it records, so that you can judge any CCTV design put in front of you, ours included.

Protect the boundary before you watch the house

Everyone who arrives at a villa, invited or not, crosses the boundary first. They come through the gate, up the driveway, past the service entrance or over a side wall, and every one of those moments happens outdoors, where a camera can see them without seeing your family. That is why we treat CCTV as a protective ring around the villa, never an eye inside it. A ring that covers the approaches records who came, when and from where, well before anyone reaches a door.

The habit we would like the industry to lose is starting indoors because the floor plans are what is on the table. It tends to produce a camera in the hallway that records the children coming down to breakfast, and a side garden that nobody watches at all. We would rather put the effort into the edges, which anyone uninvited has to cross, and leave the rooms to the people who live in them.

The site plan decides how many cameras you need

It follows that a floor plan alone cannot design CCTV. A floor plan shows rooms, but not the boundary wall, the gates, the side passages or the corner of the garden that no window overlooks. The site plan shows all of them, so the ring is designed from it, before anything else.

The size of the ring comes from the geometry of the plot, because every corner needs to be seen and so does every way in. In our designs that comes to between four and ten outdoor cameras, fewer on a compact plot with a single gate and more on a large plot with several entrances and long side passages. The gate is covered as part of the ring rather than added as an afterthought, and so is the service entrance, which is as much a way in as the front door.

Outdoors we use bullet cameras, which are built for the weather and make it plain to anyone which way they are looking. A pan-tilt-zoom camera is available on request, but we never count one as coverage, because a camera that can look anywhere is only ever looking at one place.

Cameras inside only when you ask for them

Indoor cameras are not part of our default design. We add them when a client asks, in the places the client chooses, but we will not put a camera by default in a bedroom, a bathroom, a dressing room or the staff quarters. Those rooms belong to the people who sleep, wash and dress in them, the household staff included, and a camera there records private life far more often than it records a threat.

Where cameras do go indoors we use domes, which sit neatly on the ceiling and draw far less notice than a bullet. The principle still holds: the service entrance is covered, the interiors are not, and anything more is a decision you make on purpose.

Recording days set the size of the drive

A recorder is only as useful as the footage still on it when you go looking. Our default is 31 days, which covers a month away or an incident that nobody noticed for a few weeks. You can choose 60 or 90 days instead, and a family that spends the summer abroad might prefer the longer window, so that the start of their absence is still on the drive when they return.

Whatever you choose, the drive is calculated from the recording days, never guessed. The storage a camera uses depends on its resolution, frame rate and compression, and on whether it records continuously or only on motion. Take those figures from the datasheet of the camera specified, multiply them across the cameras and the days, and the size of the drive follows. A round-number drive with no working behind it may well be right, but nobody reading the bill can tell whether it holds a month or a fortnight.

The recorder's channels get the same care. We allow a quarter more channels than there are cameras and round up to the next standard size of 8, 16 or 32, so a ring of eight cameras gets a sixteen-channel recorder rather than one that is full on the day it is installed. When you later decide the garden needs another camera, it has somewhere to plug in.

One brand, rated for the heat, with one station per door

Each villa gets one camera brand, and the recorder is chosen to accept that brand's cameras. Mixed brands can usually be persuaded to show a picture, but the finer features tend to work only when camera and recorder come from the same family, and every extra brand adds another app and another round of firmware updates.

Outdoor cameras must be rated for full Gulf sun, because a camera on an exposed wall spends the summer in heat that equipment designed for milder climates was never meant to face. Any cable that crosses the building envelope runs through open air and ground, where it can pick up surges it would never meet indoors. Those runs get shielded outdoor cable and surge protection at both ends, so that a surge is caught at the camera and again before it reaches the equipment in the rack.

At the doors the rule is equally simple: one door station per door, answered from the large hub screens on the main living floors. A door station and a separate video doorbell on the same door is a conflict we resolve with you during the design, because two devices mean two chimes, two apps and a visitor pressing whichever button they notice first.

What to send us

If you would like a CCTV design for your villa, send us the site plan along with the floor plans and tell us how many days of recording you want. The bill that comes back ties every camera to the corner or entry it covers, and the drive to the days it has to hold.