// The founders

Built by Home Assistant specialists. Not just installers.

CtrlSpace is run by its two co-founders, and both of them are on your project. One comes from seven years inside the Home Assistant ecosystem; the other from designing systems for the public sector, defence, healthcare and commercial clients. Every design session, every integration decision and every handover goes through one of them - there is no layer of salespeople between you and the people who build the thing.

Joel

Co-founder · Managing Director

Joel is a solutions architect with five years of experience designing and delivering technology solutions across the public sector, defence, healthcare and commercial industries. His work spans the full spectrum of automation and systems design - from VBA-based process tooling to LLM-driven workflow automation - with a consistent focus on translating operational pain points into practical, deployable solutions.

Grounded in design thinking, Joel builds systems that adapt to the way people actually work, rather than forcing users to adapt to the technology. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Information and Communications Technology (Information Security).

On a CtrlSpace project he is the person asking what actually goes wrong in your week before anyone talks about hardware. The scope, the pricing you are quoted and the shape of the dashboard you end up using all come out of that conversation - which is why the case studies on this site start with a problem rather than a product.

Background

5 years as a solutions architect across public sector, defence, healthcare and commercial.
Automation and systems design, from VBA process tooling to LLM-driven workflows.
BEng, Information and Communications Technology (Information Security).

Talk to Joel

Marshall

Co-founder · Technical Director

Marshall is an experienced Home Assistant systems integrator with over seven years in smart-home and home automation. His personal projects on the Home Assistant Community have earned more than 500,000 views, establishing him as a respected contributor known for reliable, scalable smart-home systems.

He designs reliable, scalable, future-proof smart homes with transparent pricing. A strong advocate for open-platform, brand-agnostic integration, he believes homeowners should never be locked into a single ecosystem - using Home Assistant to build flexible, privacy-focused, fully customised homes across Singapore.

In practice that means he owns the parts of a project most people never see: the network the system sits on, the radios it talks over, the naming and structure underneath the dashboard, and the documentation you are handed at the end. The work he is proudest of is the work that never calls attention to itself.

Background

7+ years in smart-home and home automation.
500,000+ views on his Home Assistant Community projects.
Open-platform advocate - no vendor lock-in, by design.

GitHub Reddit

// How the two halves meet

One of us asks what your day looks like. The other makes the house answer.

Engineering before sales

Nobody at CtrlSpace is paid to move a product. The design session exists to work out what your household actually needs, and the honest answer is sometimes less than you came in expecting.

You own what we build

Every system runs locally on hardware in your home, and you receive full administrative access at handover. Nothing about the system depends on us still being in the picture.

Two people, one accountability

A small company means the person who designed your system is the person who installed it, and the person who picks up the phone afterwards. There is nobody to hand you off to.

“

Control the system that controls your space.

Marshall & Joel · co-founders, CtrlSpace

Meet the people who will build it.

A design session is a conversation about your household, not a sales call. Bring your floor plan if you have one.

Book a design session