A Dawson County man attended a conference last month in Los Angeles that brought together 100 of the nation’s top players in the custom electronics industry.

Digital Interiors President Ron Rimawi has lived in Dawson County for the past 20 years. He started a home audio/video business in Alpharetta about 15 years ago.

Rimawi was invited to the CE Pro Summit Nov. 2-4 based on skills in the industry.

The 17-man team of Digital Interiors works all over the southeast, installing specialty systems in homes that can do all sorts of neat tricks.

Rimawi calls them home “lifestyle enhancing” systems.

Examples of Rimawi’s work include flat-screen televisions that descend at a 90-degree angle from ceiling tiles with the push of a button; intuitive home lighting systems a user can program; touch-screen room-by-room audio controls; and home theater rooms.

Admittedly, such systems are considered a luxury in the present economy, Rimawi said. However, the prices of custom electronics are coming down, where they used to be available only to the wealthy.

“The beauty of this stuff is it’s actually affordable,” Rimawi said. “Years ago, it wasn’t. Now, it’s much more affordable for the average customer.”

He said home setups run from about $5,000 to $10,000 nowadays. Years ago, similar systems would have cost anywhere from $50,000 to $400,000.

Despite descending costs of home systems, the allure of such products does attract wealthy clients, some of which are celebrities in the metro Atlanta area.

“There are some celebrity clients,” Rimawi said. “We have Hawks players and Falcons players ... we did [British Open winner] Stewart Cink’s lake house.”

Rimawi’s work is very client-specific, he said.

“We have one person, who has a button they can push in their bedroom. It’s their ‘good morning button,’” Rimawi said. “When pressed, the button turns on a set of lights downstairs and automatically sets the thermostat to a certain temperature.

“It takes about 30 minutes for this client to get ready for work, so the television automatically turns on to CNN 30 minutes after pressing the ‘good morning button.’”

Rimawi’s customers can choose several choices for lighting control as well, including ‘welcome home’ lighting, ‘goodbye’ lighting and ‘bump in the night’ lighting.

“If you hear something outside, the ‘bump in the night’ setting turns off any lights inside the house and turns on a bunch of lights outside, so people can’t see into the home,” Rimawi said.

For more information about Digital Interiors, visit www.diiatl.com.