Ventana’s luxury life continuing care retirement community is Dallas’ first and only luxury high-rise. The 680,000 sq. ft. facility has two adjacent 12-story towers and two levels of underground parking. The continuing care levels include independent living, assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing and rehabilitation units.

Challenge

Originally, the division 28 specifications had already been written for a competitive brand of access control software. The plan was to use traditional hard-wired access control on exterior openings that were being controlled by a competitor’s software on typical access openings. Inside, Schlage NDE wireless locksets were used on residential entry doors. The NDE locks were going to be controlled by some other type of software mechanism. The issue was that the residential wireless locks and the external hard-wired access readers couldn’t both be controlled by the competitor’s software. Despite the suggestion to move to AccessNsite, the owner decided to stay with the original contract documents and use what was originally specified.

Solution

Plans moved accordingly, division 8 materials were provided, and everything was installed. At that time, the general contractor discovered that the two systems were indeed not compatible. Since the Mercury panels are built on an open platform, AccessNsite was able to offer a total security solution for all access points both interior and exterior without having to rip and replace everything.

American Direct and AccessNsite worked seamlessly to provide the owner what they ultimately wanted — a total openings solution throughout the Ventana® retirement community.