A photograph of David Lewis that hangs in his second-floor home office says it all.
His blonde hair long, his jeans tight, a guitar by his side, it is the portrait of a young man as rock star.
"Wannabe rock star," corrects Mr. Lewis, today chief executive of Ren-Vest Mercantile Bancorp Inc., the financial institution the native South African founded in his adopted city of Toronto six years ago.
"I never really got past the audition stage."
Be that as it may, Mr. Lewis, while his hair is shorter now, still harbours a deep-seated love of rock and roll.
All the radios in his century-old Forest Hill house are cued to either classic rock station Q-107 or newcomer The Edge, with the CBC significantly ranked third on his list of go-to sources for his favourite genre of music.
Actually, his house, purchased seven years ago, is a radio, if not a stereophonic sound system, wired inside and out to create an interactive media system that, at a push of button, can play everyone from Bowie to Zeppelin from any spot in the home.
"Technology has changed so much that you can have music now wherever you are in the world," says the 53-year old divorced father of two teenaged children.
"Everything is stored on a server. It all works by remote control."
He grabs his iPad Touch, programmed with a Sonos multi-room control system app, to give an impromptu demonstration.
After digitally surfing through a sea of Beatles songs - nothing but the best - he settles on Yer Blues, and before you can say "My mother is of the earth," the room swells with a tsunami of crystal clear audio sound.
Mr. Lewis modifies the volume as he walks around the main floor of his house, touching buttons embedded into the walls to drive it louder and softer at will: A man in control of his world.
"I have my ideas about how I like things to work for me," he says, turning down the sound to talk, his Johannesburg accent a sing-song in and of itself.
"I've never liked buying things right off the shelf, so it's all mainly custom, made to order."
Making it was Peer Dischleit, an IT engineer whom Mr. Lewis met at his Bay Street offices. They started a conversation, prompted by Mr. Lewis asking him, "Do you know how to do audio, at all?"
It happened that audio was Mr. Dischleit's secret passion, his hobby as it were.
He agreed to come over to Mr. Lewis's house to talk some more, and over a bottle of wine they hatched a plan to rewire the entire house for sound.
Soon after, Mr. Lewis became his first customer for a custom audio design that cost between $40,000 to $50,000 to create and install.
"The objective was to design, build and implement a media solution that seamlessly tied together all data, media and communications requirements," says Mr. Dischleit whose Toronto-based company, Mirosuite, specializes in building digital solutions for residential, commercial and corporate clients.
"A lot of time went into researching amplifiers and speakers and distribution and storage systems from an aesthetic and more importantly from a quality point of view," Mr. Lewis adds.
"Peer managed to accomplish a lot of things, installing a very robust system and installing it before the renovation on this house started two years ago."
Overseeing that renovation was interior designer Shelley Kirsch whose main challenge was making speakers work as a decor element, which was a lot harder than you'd think.
"We took a year discussing what to do and what not to do," Ms. Kirsch says. "The project evolved, which was a good way to go about it, because it gave us a chance to finesse during that year of dialogue."
"A lot of work went into making it simple," continues Mr. Lewis. "There are a lot of great sounding systems out there that look awful, even the speakers. I wanted to be surrounded by all-natural looking things. I enjoy having different elements from nature all around me."
To achieve this goal, the interior was gutted to get rid of its original Edwardian design, a look Mr. Lewis calls "old frump," in favour of a more contemporary profile.
Ms. Kirsch then introduced stainless steel beams and cladding for the two main floor fireplaces, wood floors, sculptural Artemide lighting and, in the main floor powder room, such innovative touches as a sink made from a rough-hewn slab of stone.
The stainless steel adds a touch of hard-edged masculinity to this marital-home-turned-bachelor-pad, a detail Mr. Lewis appreciates for having made the home feel like a reflection of him.
"Sterile doesn't do it for me," he says. "I like details in a design, the differentiations in texture and materials. In this house you've got steel, wood, concrete, leather, fabric, glass. There's also going to be a water feature. I like the contrasts and the similarities, the way they mesh together."
But the steel also served another purpose: Ingeniously, Ms. Kirsch used the material to cover a pair of speakers that hang in full view on the living room wall, blasting out music while resting easy on the eye for blending seamlessly with the overall interior design. Other speakers are hidden in the ceiling, out of sight but certainly not out of mind.
"All the speakers are synchronized," Mr. Lewis says. "If I want to, I could play them all at the same time."
And you know he wants to.