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 surfaced something nobody knew. The moment the site came online, monitoring that had never been able to report finally could — flagging a fault the unfinished build had left behind, which we were then able to put right. A neat illustration of the point: proper infrastructure doesn’t just connect a site, it shows you what’s been hiding.
Phase three: security that works with what they own
The site’s security simply needed to do its job properly. The existing setup had aged past usefulness — sixteen cameras recording to a single small drive, motion alerts that fired on everything, and footage that took an age to search. Plenty of hardware; not much you could rely on. It’s a common place for a site that’s grown in stages to end up.
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.