+1 to the ease of a SmartTiles.click dashboard.
+1 to Sonos, if you’re willing to pay a premium. For me, that was worth spending because a clean mobile phone app that easily integrated everything from the home computer library to digital services to NPR produced a high Spousal Acceptance Factor.
Some additional disorganized suggestions here:
(1) Plan around other residents needs (which they may not be able to articulate). Your willingness to tolerate HA that doesn’t behave as anticipated will always be higher than that of everyone else in the house. For proof, I submit the first post of this thread. Don’t be that guy. (Good advice there too.)
(2) Plan for larger electrical boxes. The Z-wave switches are fat. In a wall-panel of multiple switches, you can run out of room. Your electrician will not be anticipating this. He’ll think there will be tons of room in the box, because he’s accustomed to installing thin switches. Then he’ll see a giant z-wave switch and say, “what the hell is that?!”
(3) Buy your router last, at a place with a good return policy. I retired an old 2.4 Ghz router in favor of a 5ghz router because it reliably crashed my Zigbee network at high data through-puts. I couldn’t determine if it was the router itself, or all 2.4 Ghz traffic, but your best bet is to have all your HA stuff installed first, because you can’t easily replace that, and test the router at the end.
(4) Sounds like you’ve already decided on ST, but whatever you do, don’t get yourself locked into a proprietary system. If it isn’t interoperable, you don’t really own the hardware. If you buy a lot of ST hardware and decide you hate ST, you can still get their Z-wave and Zigbee stuff to talk to someone else’s system. If you get locked into a proprietary system of non-interoperable hardware, you risk having several $K in hardware orphaned because some CFO decided to cut loose the HA division in order to hit Q3 estimates.