Most disappointing smart lighting was bought rather than designed. Somebody chose a brand, the boxes arrived, an electrician was asked to fit them, and the result is a flat where the hall light works from a phone but not from the wall, the dimmer buzzes, and guests cannot turn anything on. The technology was rarely the problem. The order of decisions was.
This guide is about how to get it right in Central London specifically — which is a harder environment than the marketing imagines, because the building stock here was wired for a single pendant per room in an era when nobody had heard of a neutral at a switch, and because thick masonry walls do interesting things to wireless signals.
Three ways of doing it, and they are not equivalent
Smart bulbs
The cheapest entry and the one with the most built-in frustration. Intelligence lives in each lamp, so the wall switch becomes a trap: switch it off and the "smart" bulb is simply a bulb with no power. Households solve this by taping over switches, which tells you something. Bulbs suit a rented flat, a single room, or someone experimenting. They do not suit a whole home, and they age badly — every lamp is a small computer with a lifespan, and replacing forty of them is not a saving.
Smart switches and retrofit modules
The middle ground, and for most Central London flats the sensible one. Either the wall switch is replaced with an intelligent one, or a small module is fitted behind the existing switch or in the ceiling, leaving ordinary lamps in place. The wall switch still works exactly as a wall switch, which matters more than any feature. It also means the fittings stay dumb and cheap, so replacing a lamp is replacing a lamp.
Centralised wired systems
Intelligence sits in a panel, usually near or alongside the board, with wiring running out to keypads and circuits. This is what larger houses and serious refurbishments use. It is reliable, it is expensive, and — the critical point — it demands a wiring topology that period buildings do not have and cannot get without a rewire. If you are doing a full refurbishment and the walls are already open, it is on the table. If you are not, it usually is not.
The right question is not "which brand is best". It is "which of these three does my building actually permit?" — and that answer comes from behind the switch plate.
The neutral problem, which decides most of it
Here is the technical fact that governs smart lighting in older London flats. Traditional lighting circuits were commonly wired so that the switch loop carries a live down to the switch and back, with the neutral terminating at the ceiling rose. There is no neutral at the switch position at all. Most intelligent switches need a permanent supply to keep themselves powered — which means they need that neutral.
So opening a switch plate in a Victorian conversion in Bayswater or an Edwardian mansion flat in Maida Vale often reveals: no neutral, a shallow back box chased into solid masonry with no room for a module behind the plate, and on genuinely old circuits, no circuit protective conductor either — which is why so many period flats still have plastic switch plates, because a metal one would have nothing to earth to.
Any of those three findings changes the design. There are workarounds — modules that live at the ceiling rose rather than the switch, switches designed to work without a neutral, deeper back boxes where the wall allows chasing, running new switch drops where the fabric permits. Each has trade-offs and each has to be assessed at your switch positions rather than assumed. This is why a competent quote starts with taking a plate off and looking, and why a fixed price offered over the phone for "smart switches throughout" is worth nothing.
If the inspection reveals lighting circuits with no CPC and perished insulation, you are in a different conversation altogether — putting new electronics onto a circuit at the end of its life is money badly spent. Our guide to rewiring a period property explains how that decision is reached.
Dimming, flicker and buzz
The most common complaint after installation, and almost always a compatibility issue rather than a fault. LED lamps and their drivers vary enormously in how they respond to dimming, and a dimmer that is happy with one manufacturer's driver can produce visible flicker, a limited dimming range, or an audible buzz with another. It is solved at specification — by choosing dimmer and load together from combinations known to work — and it is very difficult to solve afterwards without changing components.
Two practical rules follow. Buy the lamps and the control as one decision, not two. And be sceptical of a design that mixes several lamp types on one dimmed circuit, because the circuit will behave like the worst of them.
The network, and why mansion blocks are hostile
Wireless lighting depends on radio, and radio depends on the building. Central London flats tend to have solid masonry walls, sometimes thick brick party walls, occasionally lath and plaster with metal in it from later work, and a stairwell full of other people's networks competing for the same airspace. A system that works flawlessly in a modern open-plan flat can be unreliable across a long mansion block hallway with three solid walls in the way.
What that means in practice: hub position is a design decision, not a spare shelf; mesh systems that route through mains-powered devices generally cope better than ones depending on a single hub reaching everything; and if the flat's data network is weak, the lighting inherits the weakness. In a wider refurbishment it is worth deciding where the network equipment lives at the same time as the lighting, because the two are the same project whether or not they are on the same quote.
Cloud dependency: the question to ask before you buy
Ask whether the system still works when the internet is down and whether it still works if the manufacturer stops supporting it. Some systems keep local control and treat the app as a convenience. Others route everything through a remote service, so a broadband fault becomes a lighting fault. We are not going to name products — the market changes faster than any web page — but the question is the right one and it separates the serious from the disposable. Lighting is infrastructure. It should degrade to "the switch still works", not to "nothing works".
Consent, fabric and the things people forget
Retrofit modules behind existing plates are minimally invasive, which is one of their strongest arguments in protected buildings. New switch positions are not: they mean chasing, and in a listed building, works affecting special character typically require listed building consent — a duty that applies inside as well as out. In a conservation area, further planning controls can apply to anything external. Confirm the position with your council before designing a scheme around new switch drops rather than after.
If you are a leaseholder, most leases require the freeholder's or managing agent's consent for alterations. A like-for-like switch swap is generally uncontroversial; chasing walls, adding circuits, or putting equipment into voids that may sit outside your demise is not necessarily so, and you should confirm with your managing agent. Where a scheme involves recessed fittings, the ceiling questions in our guide to downlights in a listed building apply in full — and they apply harder than the smart controls do.
All of this is electrical work in a dwelling: it falls under Building Regulations Part P and must be designed and tested to BS 7671, with appropriate certification. Adding controls also adds load and, in some cases, adds leakage to earth from a set of drivers, which occasionally surfaces at the board — see consumer unit upgrades if the flat starts nuisance tripping after a lighting scheme goes in.
Commissioning is the job
The installation is the smaller half. What makes a scheme good is the setting-up: what each keypad does, what the scenes are called, what happens at the front door at midnight, and — the test almost nobody applies — whether a guest or a cleaner can operate the flat without instructions. The best schemes are the ones where you cannot tell anything unusual has been done: the switches are where switches are, they do what switches do, and the extra intelligence sits behind them for the people who want it.
Two more things worth insisting on. First, documentation: which module is behind which plate, what is on which circuit, and what the account details are. A smart flat sold without its documentation is a flat where the next owner replaces the lot. Second, handover: someone should sit down and show whoever lives there how it works. If it needs a manual, the design was wrong.
How we approach it
We take a plate off before we quote, because what is behind it decides the whole design. We will tell you when a modest scheme in the two rooms that matter beats a whole-flat system nobody uses, and we will tell you when your building simply will not support what you have been sold. Our electrical work starts from £80 with set prices published on the electrical page, and lighting schemes are quoted as a fixed price against a written scope before work starts.
Ex-commercial and converted stock throws up the most surprises behind the plates, and our Fitzrovia electrician page covers that part of W1. If you want a scheme designed rather than assembled, tell us about the flat and send a photo of a switch plate with the cover on — it tells us more than a brochure does.