You have waited for weeks but the job is finally done. Yes, it took a lot of planning. And you suffered occasional inconveniences in the process, including a couple of nights at a local hotel when the technicians rewired large parts of your house. But now your new home theater awaits, the security system is installed, and your home environment is enhanced by the latest in multizone heating and air conditioning.

It used to be enough to merely impress. But today, it takes 500 horsepower to get a car enthusiast’s attention, and a $500,000 Girard-Perregaux to turn the head of a watch fetishist. Surely 500-foot yachts await us in the near future. We have transcended such terms as good, better and best. We now live in a world of extreme.

When most people visit a custom electronics installer, they want a Ferrari—or, at least, the audiovisual equivalent of a Ferrari. In more literal terms, that’s a state-of-the-art home theater system. But the sexiness of those systems steals attention from another part of the installer’s repertoire: home automation.

In the strictest sense, central vacuum systems do not play a role in today’s automated home. However, they merit consideration from anyone who’s contemplating a domestic makeover.