At 250 East 53rd Street, The Veneto is the kind of Midtown East condominium where residents expect everything to work quietly and flawlessly, including the building's security. But behind the lobby's polished calm, the infrastructure was showing its age: legacy Schlage door hardware, an aging camera system, and access control that had grown piecemeal over the years.
CK Technology designed a top-to-bottom security and surveillance modernization for the entire building. New Salto smart locks on every resident door with Kantech access control for all doors and in all common areas. New Axis cameras in every corridor, elevator, and common space paired with Exacq VMS. Elevator access control. A unified network backbone to run it all. One project, one integrated system.
The heart of the project is the resident door. CK is replacing the existing Schlage hardware on more than 100 unit doors with SALTO AElement offline smart locks: contactless readers with BLE and MIFARE/DESFire credential support, ANSI mortise locks with privacy and egress detection, and polished stainless handlesets.
Here's the detail that matters in a building like this: every door gets a custom-fabricated 1/16-inch stainless steel plate, cut to the exacting specs of the new handleset, key override, and card reader. Fifty-four of them, interior and exterior, built to look like they were always part of the door. In a luxury residence, new technology can't look bolted on. It has to look inevitable.
Because the SALTO locks are offline, there's no need to wire every door back to a central panel, which makes a retrofit across 100+ occupied units dramatically cleaner and faster. Residents tap a keytag or phone. Management programs credentials from a desk instead of cutting keys.
Access control extends into the building's vertical transportation. CK integrated Kantech readers with the elevator systems, coordinating directly with the elevator company, so credentials determine not just whether you can enter the building, but which floors you can reach. Service elevator, passenger elevators, mechanical rooms: every path mapped, every credential permissioned.
The camera system was rebuilt from scratch with Axis network cameras chosen for each specific location:
AI-powered 5MP domes watch the main lobby entrance, service entrance, and parking garage.
Dual-sensor multidirectional cameras cover the cellar corridors, capturing two directions from a single mount.
6MP 360-degree cameras with deep-learning analytics overlook the children's playroom and service corridors, a single camera doing the work of several.
Thumb-sized covert sensors ride inside the passenger elevators, and a ligature-resistant corner camera covers the service elevator.
All of it records to an exacqVision network video recorder with 48TB of RAID storage, monitored from a dedicated workstation in the resident manager's office. Forensic search, powered by on-camera metadata, means finding an incident takes minutes instead of hours of scrubbing.
The unglamorous backbone makes the glamorous parts possible: a FortiGate security appliance, managed PoE switching, hundreds of feet of new Cat6 and armored fiber, and every cable run terminated, certified, and warranted. CK also reconfigured the building's staff PCs and workstations onto a properly segmented network, so the security system and the office network stop stepping on each other.
The real challenge of a project like this isn't the technology, it's the logistics. This is an occupied luxury residence. Work has to be phased door by door, corridor by corridor, with residents coming and going the entire time. Elevator integration means coordinating with the elevator vendor's schedule, not the other way around. CK's project management covers all of it: design, contractor coordination, documentation, and staff training on the finished system.
When the project completes, The Veneto runs on a single coherent security platform: one credential for doors, elevators, and common areas; one camera system with intelligent search; one network built to carry it all. Residents notice nothing except that everything simply works. That's the whole point.
Planning an upgrade in your building? Contact CK Technology Group at sales@cktechnology.com to discuss your project.
