When the whole town’s talking about it.

Cut through the thoroughfare between Queen Street and Lorne Street in Auckland's CBD and two large LED panels are hard to miss. They mark the entrance to the Radisson Red at 280 Queen Street, and fifteen floors up, a rooftop bar that's had the city talking since it opened.

Inside, the lighting runs low and warm, the music sits at a level you can still talk over, and the wall displays play deep reds and cinematic imagery that match a brand built around art, music and design rather than generic hotel loops.

That consistency didn't happen by accident. Westan and the wider project team treated the audio, signage, in-room displays and rooftop sound as part of the interior design brief from the outset, rather than a line item added once the fit-out was finished.

More than a hotel fit-out

At over $200 million, 280 Queen Street is a mixed-use development combining retail, hotel accommodation, conference facilities and a rooftop dining bar, with technology running through every layer of it.

UNICOM Intelligent Building was the lead systems integrator across the entire property, and their scope went well beyond conventional AV work. "This project is quite unique for us, integrating with a lot of different systems," says David Huang, Project Manager of UNICOM Intelligent Building. "We've basically covered most of the IT-related systems for the hotel — that ranges from the fibre backbone network infrastructure and the Wi-Fi, voice-over-IP systems, all the way to the TVs and guest room entertainment systems, and also the security systems such as CCTV surveillance, access control and the intercom."

For Westan, supporting a project of this breadth meant supplying and backing multiple brands across every zone of the building. "Supporting them on this project, we've been able to assist across multiple systems and provide an end-to-end audiovisual solution," says Bryce Perigo, Commercial Product Manager of Westan in New Zealand.

In-room entertainment: Philips PPDS and MediaSuite

Across 322 guest rooms on Levels 3 to 14, Philips PPDS MediaSuite televisions form the centrepiece of the in-room experience. It's one of the largest Philips PPDS hospitality deployments in New Zealand, built for hotel operations, with central content management, welcome screen customisation and casting straight from a guest's own device.

"The whole hospitality business is driven by in-room entertainment," says Alan Bowman, Business Development Manager at Westan in New Zealand. "Philips is a market leader in in-room digital hospitality. Philips CMND is a piece of software that's built into the TV — it allows things like the landing page, so the hotel can create it, manipulate it, manage it."

The MediaSuite also integrates directly with the hotel's Property Management System, which means the display pulls a guest's name from the reservation on arrival. From there, guests can browse dining menus, book amenities, check in-house services and look up local recommendations, without picking up the phone.

Casting works the same way. "It's all about access to your own content," Bowman explains. "With your mobile, with your tablet, whatever it might be, you can cast from your device point-to-point via a QR code. That takes away the necessity to put in passwords."

Audio across the building: Kramer at every level

Walk through the lobby, the restaurant, the bar, the wellness centre or the Level 15 conference bar and you're hearing Kramer commercial audio, managed through a single Kramer Control touch panel that lets staff adjust zones, manage sources and automate scheduling. By specifying Kramer across audio, control and AV distribution at once, UNICOM cut down on integration complexity and kept every zone in the hotel behaving the same way. 

The conference centre: KDS-17 AVoIP

On Level 15, next to Aka Rooftop Bar, four meeting rooms of varying sizes are built around Kramer's KDS-17 AVoIP platform. They can run independently or combine into one large event space.

"The conference centre on Level 15 is right next to the rooftop bar. There's four combinable rooms and the new KDS-17 really excels here," says Theo van Niekerk, Sales Director of Kramer Oceania. "It allows us to deliver a fully flexible system and do multiple things — the correct quality of server settings for those various elements within the room, along with eUSB and VLAN management in a converged network environment. There are so many things that we can achieve, it was the ultimate choice."

The KDS-17 delivers 4K60 4:4:4 video with under-frame latency over standard 1Gbps network infrastructure, so there's no need for dedicated AV cabling and no drop in image quality regardless of how the rooms are configured. Sources switch in under a second, and any input in any room can be routed to any display in any room. When the partition walls open and the four spaces combine into one hall, the system scales without a technician touching anything. Kramer Control handles the switching logic behind it, and hotel staff run the whole suite from one touch panel.

The KDS-17 also supports Dante and AES67 digital audio streaming, so the conference rooms integrate natively with the Kramer audio running through the rest of the hotel. "There were a lot of systems in this building and we managed to integrate them all into one connected solution," Huang notes.

The rooftop: Kramer AW-8P

Aka Rooftop Bar, designed by Izzard Design, occupies a 236 square metre open terrace on Level 15, with views across the city to the Sky Tower. Most outdoor speaker systems force a trade-off between weather resistance and sound quality for a venue of this calibre. The Kramer AW-8P all-weather speaker range was specified here to avoid that trade-off.

"At the rooftop bar, we have delivered a full audio system that's all set up with presets to enable ease of use for the staff that run this venue," says Perigo. "From the VIP room out to the huge terrace, they have large brand-new Kramer 8-inch all-weather speakers surrounding this venue — IP66-rated, and especially with the rooftop bar having an operable roof that opens up, you really want that IP66 and weatherproof rating."

The speakers are wall-mounted around the terrace perimeter, alongside wall-mounted sub units, keeping the hardware clean within Izzard Design's aesthetic. With Auckland's weather and a roof that opens the venue fully to the elements, that rating matters for the long haul, not just on paper.

The system also runs on presets tied to the venue's rhythm through the day: a lunch setting, an afternoon setting, an evening setting, each one adjusting volume, EQ and zone configuration with a single button press as the roof opens and the crowd shifts from lunch to peak evening service. Staff select the preset from the touch panel at the bar; no AV knowledge and no phone call to a technician required.

"A new team member can be shown the system in minutes. The complexity lives in the programming — what staff interact with is a clear, simple choice," Perigo says. "What remains is the right music, at the right level, for the right moment in the evening."

The first impression: Aurora LED on Queen Street

Before a guest checks in, before they ride the lift, before they order a drink, there are two Aurora LED displays in the thoroughfare at street level, five by two metres each, with a 2.6mm pixel pitch.

"These large-format Aurora displays are doing real commercial work — they're concentrated on pulling foot traffic in from both Queen Street and Lorne Street, drawing people up through the thoroughfare and into the hotel and the rooftop bar," Perigo explains. "At that scale and resolution, in that location, they're impossible to ignore."

For Aka Rooftop Bar, which draws a broader Auckland crowd beyond hotel guests, that street-level presence drives foot traffic and awareness directly. It's also the one piece of this installation that every Aucklander can encounter without setting foot inside the building.

The result

From the Aurora displays on Queen Street, to the Philips CMND system greeting guests by name, to the Kramer speakers soundtracking an evening fifteen floors up, every layer of this installation was built to serve the guest experience rather than a specification sheet.

For Westan, UNICOM and the wider project team, 280 Queen Street shows what's possible when AV infrastructure gets the same creative consideration as the architecture around it. That's still rare in this market.

"It's been great to be part of this large project here in Auckland City on Queen Street, with UNICOM, and getting a great result for Radisson Red and their customers," says Perigo.

Michael Chow, Executive Director of Stonewood Group, the project's developer, sums up the reaction: "From the finishing product, everyone just comes in and says — wow, this is amazing. The rooftop, the Radisson Red — the whole town's talking about it. It's amazing. It's just superb."