Staying in the Loxone Smart Show Home – Part 2

Loxone HQ

In Part 1 we looked at our stay in the Loxone Show Home in Austria, but there were several other sites we visited over the weekend too.

One of the highlights of the trip was our visit to the Loxone HQ, also located in Kollerschlag, just across the road from the show home.

Loxone Base Camp

It’s one of those stunning contemporary buildings that looks like a spaceship has landed.

An ultra-modern facility with around 100 ‘Loxonauts’ working there, it’s the building where all the hardware and software for the smart home system is developed as well as being home to the administration, marketing and training departments too.

Basement

Loxone Warehouse, Austria

We started our tour of the Mother Ship on the basement level which houses the distribution centre. With row after row of lovely Loxone smart home tech, what would you give for a 10 minute trolly dash around this warehouse 🙂

Loxone HQ - Green LED Stairs

We noticed over the weekend that nearly everything we used from pens to cooking utensils were all in Loxone’s corporate green. The cool staircase to the next level of base camp was no different as we climbed to the ground floor level of the building.

Ground Floor

Here the reception area sits in front of the training room where partners from Germany and Austria receive their certification.

You can also see the range of Loxone smart home products as well as check out their worldwide locations (including their new offices in China).

Loxone HQ

The rest of this level is taken up with a cool cafe where everyone enjoys chef prepared lunches each day.

There’s an NFC system for employee snacks and drinks too with wall mounted iPads showing who’s had what. The work hard, play hard ethic here, along with the foosball table and basketball hoop, all make the atmosphere seem more silicon valley than Austrian village.

Loxone Cafe

This floor to ceiling rack of Loxone hardware towers above your head and it continues on through to the top floor, which was where we were headed next.

Loxone HQ - Rack

First Floor

The huge open plan top deck of the Base Camp is where all the action happens with the majority of staff being based up here. We visited on a Saturday and while it was empty you could imagine the productivity from this enormous office.

Some high backed soft seats were turned to look out across the stunning Austrian countryside and apparently this is where you go when looking for inspiration or to overcome that software challenge you’re working through.

Loxone HQ at Night

More NFC is used here, this time on a long bank of cube shaped staff lockers. Even the large filing system uses this RFID tech to allow access to authorised staff.

Florian Woess, Loxone CMO

Our guide for the day, Loxone’s CMO Florian Woess, told us they had outgrown this building and plans are at an advanced stage to extend their operation in Kollerschlag.

Construction will start next year and this major extension to the existing building will see it grow to cater for up to 400 people. Loxone’s expansion, from a start just a decade ago, continues apace.

We asked Philipp Schuster, Managing Director at Loxone UK for an update on the growth of the company in the United Kingdom and he told us…

In the seven years that we have been in the UK, we have seen continued growth and we are facing a similar situation as we face with our Basecamp in Austria; after only being in our UK offices for five years, we are looking to triple the size of our office within the next twelve months to accommodate ever-increasing demand for training and the growing size of our UK team. Such rapid growth has, at times, been challenging but overall it is the best problem to have.

Philipp Schuster

Future Lab

There’s one more Loxone building in the vicinity. Two minutes away from HQ in the village of Kollerschlag itself is the Loxone Future Lab.

This is where the really confidential R&D stuff happens as they work on the next generation of Loxone products in total secrecy.

Our pleads for access were met with grins but nothing else. Damn it 🙂

Loxone Future Lab

Next Time

In the final instalment we take a visit to an Austrian Self-Build that’s having a Loxone system installed, plus look at Baudisch, one of Loxone’s manufacturing plants in Germany. In the meantime checkout some more photos in the gallery below.

Read all 3 parts of our Visiting Loxone Series…
Part 1 – Staying in the Loxone Smart Show Home
Part 2 – Staying in the Loxone Smart Show Home
Part 3 – Staying in the Loxone Smart Show Home

2 Comments on "Staying in the Loxone Smart Show Home – Part 2"

  1. That all looks like a very polished and capable organisation. I guess they are a real contender for automating your new home?

    Smart home tech reminds me of where HiFi was years ago. If you really cared, did the research and knew what you were doing, then you’d get the best amp, best speakers, best cables, then put it all together yourself, or there were a few stores that would choose for you and had an install service.

    Then tower systems came in and pretty much took over the mainstream, most people didn’t want to do the research, or weren’t sufficiently engaged on the subject, and felt comfortable buying a brand they recognised. The equivalent of this layer seems to be struggling to get recognition in smart homes, but seems to be where Loxone, Control4 would fit.

    Then there was always the really high end where an installer made the decisions, did the install and you just hoped that what they provided was great because it cost so much. AMX and Crestron seems to be the equivalent here.

    It does surprise me that building smart homes is such a small part of the market.

    In my mainstream 3-series BMW the lights turn on when I open the doors, everything is linked into a security system, the doors lock and the windows close with a press of one button on a remote, an integrated HVAC sorts out the temperature and air quality, there is a multi-speaker entertainment system built in, the lights come on when it goes dark, there are at least 5 different networks in there, and its all stuff we expect in a mid-range car. But in a house that costs 20 times the price, we get, err, central heating and some cheap mechanical locks on the doors.

  2. @MichaelD – here’s the thing, in your HiFi analogy you could buy an amp, source and speakers and plug them all together and they’d (for the most part) ‘just work’. Try that with smart home tech from multiple suppliers and see how far you get.

    The Tower System could be likened to a ready made solution, perhaps something like Z-Wave. But then that doesn’t guarantee things play nice either – (read this).

    Your car example shows how good things could be. It’s a closed system put together by a single OEM and that’s looking like the best solution currently for the home too in my opinion.

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