In February 2026, we debuted "Spectral Wake" at the New American Home, the official show home of the NAHB International Builders' Show in Las Vegas. It's the biggest and most ambitious art installation we've ever done. And honestly, it's the clearest example of where I think residential design is headed.
The Project
The New American Home is basically the construction industry's biggest stage. Every year, NAHB picks one home to show off the cutting edge of residential design, tech, and craftsmanship. For 2026, that home belonged to Jason Eichenholz, CEO of Relativity Networks, co-founder and former CTO of Luminar Technologies. The company that brought lidar to self-driving cars.
Jason has spent his whole career bending light. Literally. His life's work is the physics of photons, directing them, splitting them, making them do wild things. So when we got the chance to create an art installation for his home, the brief basically wrote itself: make the house feel like light lives there.
The Material: Dichroic Acrylic
Spectral Wake is built from dichroic acrylic. It's a material that splits white light into the full color spectrum. Depending on the angle of light and where you're standing, the same panel can look deep violet, electric cyan, gold, or magenta. It doesn't need electricity to be beautiful. Just sunlight. The space becomes a living prism.
During the day, natural light through the windows hits the sculpture and paints these abstract color fields across the walls, floors, and ceilings. They shift all day as the sun moves. At night, integrated LED and projection systems take over, everything from ambient warmth to full music-reactive party mode where the sculpture dances with the beat.
The tagline we landed on, "A single wavelength, surfing the spectrum", that says it all. One source of light. Infinite color.
Design and Collaboration
I designed Spectral Wake from the ground up. Every panel angle, every mounting point, every lighting interaction, all intentional. The sculpture spans the main living area, with wall-mounted pieces that carry the visual language into the surrounding spaces. The goal was never to make a single object you look at. It was to make an environment you feel like you're inside of.
For fabrication, we teamed up with Stache Lightning, Evan Miga's studio. Evan brought the engineering precision to take what was in my head and make it structurally real. The mounting system had to work seamlessly with the home's architecture while holding panels at exact angles for maximum light interaction. That's the kind of problem that needs both an artist's eye and an engineer's brain, and Evan nailed it.
Art Leads, Technology Supports
Here's the deal, something I feel really strongly about: in the best experiential spaces, art leads and technology supports. Not the other way around.
Spectral Wake isn't cool because of its LED system or its control software (though both are solid). It's cool because the art concept stands on its own. Dichroic acrylic splitting sunlight doesn't need a single watt of electricity to stop you in your tracks. The technology layers on top, giving the sculpture more range, taking it from daytime beauty into nighttime spectacle. But the art came first. Always.
"We don't add technology to make something feel impressive. We create art that is impressive, then use technology to give it more range."
That philosophy shaped every decision we made. The LED integration is invisible when it's off. The projection mapping enhances the dichroic effects instead of fighting them. And the control system is simple enough that Jason can change the entire mood of his home with one tap.
IBS 2026: The Reveal
The International Builders' Show runs February 17-19, 2026, and the New American Home is the centerpiece. Thousands of builders, architects, designers, and media tour the home every year. For most of them, this was their first time seeing experiential art in a house. And that's exactly the conversation we wanted to start.
Homes have been left out of experiential design for way too long. Hotels invest in immersive art. Museums do. Corporate headquarters do. But homes? Homes get a painting on the wall and maybe a cool light fixture. I think that's about to change. Spectral Wake is our proof of concept.
The Bigger Picture
There's also a philanthropic side to this project through the Jonathan's Landing Foundation, which connects the home to something bigger than just a showpiece. Great spaces can serve great causes.
For us, Spectral Wake is a turning point. It's the clearest version yet of what we mean when we say we're an experiential design studio, not just an AV company. We design how people feel in a space. We create art that responds to its environment. We build things that make you stop, look up, and feel something you weren't expecting.
Want to see the full project? Check out our project page for The Building That Light Built.
And if this kind of work resonates with you, if you've got a space that deserves more than a flat screen, let's talk.
