Phase one: an auditorium two volunteers can run
Steeple is a church in Melbourne’s east. Around 2020 they inherited a property with an auditorium — and almost no volunteers to run it. A standard AV fit-out assumes a production team; they needed sound, lighting and vision driveable by one or two people on a Sunday.
So that’s what we designed: lighting on pre-built cue stacks, audio on a console manageable from an iPad, vision running from a single machine, everything plugging into one point. We installed it, operated it live for the first couple of Sundays, and trained the volunteers. A full church production still runs on a one- or two-person team today.
Phase two: the build that went wrong without us
The church later relocated and rebuilt — and the builder insisted on handling everything, with us locked out. Three builders, ballooning costs and a couple of years later, Steeple finally got the keys to a half-finished site that wasn’t usable. The connectivity problem alone was remarkable: NBN had treated every space as its own service address, leaving five separate NTDs across the site — and a church facing five internet bills just to get coverage through its own buildings.
We consolidated everything. One gateway in the comms cabinet, Cat 6 through the existing underground conduits, and a PoE switch in each building — the heritage building, the multifunction space, and all three floors of the new main building — onto one managed network with one internet service.
Then the network told us something nobody knew. The moment the site came online, the building’s alarm systems phoned home for the first time — and it emerged the alarm had been silently failing for roughly nine months, with the fire alarm incorrectly wired as well. The fire brigade arrived on site the day we connected it. That’s what a half-finished build leaves behind — and what proper infrastructure surfaces.
Phase three: security that works with what they own
With the security system barely functional, the site was being broken into — repeatedly. An intruder cased the building overnight, then returned with others almost nightly, finding new ways in. The existing system was useless for catching it: sixteen cameras over-compressed onto a tiny hard drive, motion detection that triggered on everything, and an alarm so over-sensitive it had to be left disabled. Reviewing footage meant days of scrubbing.
Other integrators quoted a full rip-and-replace, refusing to work with the existing cameras. We took the opposite approach:
- Adopt the church’s existing sixteen cameras into UniFi Protect — keeping their investment
- Add a small number of smart cameras with person and vehicle detection, ending the false-positive problem
- Retrofit keyless access onto the existing doors, plus an intercom between floors
- Power it all from the PoE switching installed in phase two — no extra power infrastructure needed
The retrofit came in cheaper than every rip-and-replace quote — and produced a more usable system, because the design worked with the client’s constraints instead of billing around them.
Why this story matters
Steeple is the proof point for project-based work: AV, networking, security and access for churches, community organisations and anyone who’s been burned by a builder or third party. Two lessons sit underneath it. Phase two’s infrastructure quietly paid for phase three — that’s what designing for the long term looks like. And being brought in early would have saved this client years and real money: the most expensive pattern we see is being called in to fix what we were locked out of.