PROJECT PROFILE

Belmont Village Senior Living

Location: Chicago, IL
General Contractor: W.E. O’Neil Construction

Providing the perfect blend of comfort, care, and active living is the goal at Belmont Village Senior Living. When planning to open their 30th facility nationwide, the company searched for a location that would offer unique opportunities for residents in an urban environment. That location was Lincoln Park in Chicago, IL. 

American Direct and AccessNsite were chosen by W.E. O’Neil Construction to provide totally integrated security solutions for the 120,500 square foot, seven story community. 300 pre-hung doors, 210 bifold doors in residential units, 4 exterior stile and rail doors, 325 hollow metal doors, 90 hollow metal frames, and 215 knock down frames were supplied, as well as AccessNsite software for access control.

Challenge

Belmont Village had already purchased some intelligent locks for the back of house and the general contractor was going to use an electrical contractor for those locks. American Direct Division 8 salesperson, Eric Van Scoy reached out to AccessNsite Security Sales Representative, Heather Rolli for counsel on how to best integrate the pre-purchased locks for back of house and the additional locks American Direct was providing for the resident entries.

Rolli says, “I took off my sales hat, so to speak, and put on my coaching hat to guide the general contractor and owner. I explained that Schlage NDE locks can communicate a few different ways, one of which is through the lock’s WiFi antenna that goes across the building’s WiFi network. The AccessNsite Allegion driver is integrated to the WiFi solution that allows communication with back of house locks, the resident entry locks, and the Mercury panel common area readers. The original electrical contractor’s solution could not do that integration. If they had continued with their original plan, they would have had to utilize a gateway for every 10 locks for a Bluetooth connection. Continuing on that path would have been very expensive. By using AccessNsite for all of the locks, it eliminated two different layers of physical equipment. With AccessNsite, all the locks communicate via the building’s WiFi network and then information is exchanged as the locks check into the system.”

Solution

AccessNsite was able to provide each aspect of the access control without the owner having to use multiple manufacturers and provided an elegant solution that enabled huge cost savings to the owner on product and labor.

Belmont Village is a perfect example of how American Direct and AccessNsite not only sell product alongside one another, but also effectively collaborate with each other, the general contractor, and the project owner in order to provide them with the single, most effective, cost efficient openings solution.