One to Watch: This Victoria Designer Is Bringing Built-In Sound Systems Back

Dead Bluetooth speakers have a way of ending up in the same places: kitchen drawers, junk bins and other shallow graveyards of tech that once seemed convenient enough. Zac Benloulou is after something more lasting. For the Victoria maker behind Pavilion Audio Systems (P.AS), the appeal of analogue is not purism—it’s presence. “Playing a record actually does require you to be physically present,” he says. “It’s just a lot more deliberate.”

READ MORE: Now Trending: At-Home Listening Rooms

That same appreciation for deliberateness shapes how Benloulou builds. “I hope that if I make something, people will want to keep it,” he says. Part of that means building with the next set of hands in mind, so “a future repairman” can open it up, understand the circuit and keep it going.

From his studio in the city’s Rockbay neighbourhood, Benloulou builds custom sound systems where audio is part of the design from the start. In a wine bar, that means mood. At home, it means music comes from something more thoughtful than a portable speaker on a shelf.

He arrived at sound systems by way of a few long-running obsessions. “I used to DJ, and I’ve just always been interested in gear and niche things,” he says. “Between the electronics tinkering and my woodworking knowledge, I realized that I could work on my own audio projects, like building speakers.” That was the first project he took on after teaching himself the old-fashioned way: “I literally bought a book from the bookstore and got going from there.”

The shift from private passion to public practice came through friends. “I wasn’t really thinking about doing it for anybody else, or as a business in any capacity,” says Benloulou. But then, he says, “My best friends opened a wine bar and asked if I could do the audio.” That project became Tourist in Victoria, where P.AS worked with designers Olivia Bull and Daniel Garrod (@oddo.work) on a speaker system meant to perform acoustically while looking entirely at home in the space. The polished stainless steel fronts even act as mirrors, helping the speakers visually dissolve into the space.

The project clarified how Benloulou likes to work. “The ideal situation is always working with interior designers or the architects as early as possible in the process,” he says. “Then you get to create something that works with their established vision of the space.”

Wall System 1, a system he designed as a prototype, pushed that idea further. Conceived after Tourist, it was his first major attempt to bring the same thinking into a home. Benloulou envisioned it as “a built-in object,” drawing inspiration from the stereo systems of the ’60s and ’70s,when sound was “integrated and built into the architecture” instead of becoming “kind of this afterthought.” It began with a simple prompt: “What would my ideal setup be?”

The answer was a wall-mounted, modular system designed to change over time. Parts can be added, moved around or swapped out, and the tangle of connections comes to the front so it’s easier to adjust.

“I used to DJ, and I’ve just always been interested in gear and niche things. Between the electronics tinkering and my woodworking knowledge, I realized that I could work on my own audio projects, like building speakers.”

He set Wall System 1 at a high price to reflect the labour and steep component costs of making it: “It was $12,000 just for the metalwork alone to get it done locally,” he says, and another version would take “two months of solid work” to build from scratch. To his surprise, interested buyers were more than happy to pay it. For now, the real constraint is time. Benloulou still works full-time in tech, so Wall System 1 lands somewhere between luxury object, design experiment and a convincing proof of concept.

That in-between state is shaping the future of P.AS. Until he can devote himself to it fully, Benloulou builds in the hours he can carve out before logging on to his day job. “I have the mornings to work on this stuff if everything is under control at work,” he says. Lately, that has meant developing more scalable pieces, including an amplifier inspired by the question friends ask him most: “What receiver do I get?” He’s also experimenting with resins and trying to move away from the metal-heavy language he sees all around him.

The long game is to go all in. “That’s all I want,” he says. To get there, he knows he’ll need ready-made pieces that can support the slower, more bespoke commissions. Still, the core idea is already humming: in Benloulou’s hands, music is not decor, nor mere background noise. It’s part of the architecture of living well.