Welcome to our smart home
The journey through our home
Welcome! We'll walk you through a tour of our house to show you how we enjoy the smart life. The first thing you'll see is a smart lock - with a swipe of a thumb, entering a code or press of a button on our phone, the door will unlock and greets you.
We designed a "feature wall" that faces you the moment the door is opened, and the ombré blue wall ushers you in.
The dining table
You're met by our dining table when you first enter.
After entering the house, the first thing you'll see is our dining table. We placed it beside the couch in the living room to maximise our use of space.
You can eat at the dining table. Or you could sit, read and write.
The dining table is also right beside the window. This means good, natural lighting for reading and writing in the day.
The living room
To the right of the dining table we laid out our sofa, which faces the TV console.
The side table beside the couch is a convenient place to put your drinks and snacks while you're seated.
And here's where it gets "smart". Say "Ok Google, turn on the downlights", and the living room immediately brightens. You can also tell Google to play your favourite song, and the room will start to fill with music.
The view from the couch.
Movie time?
Just tell Alexa or Google Home to activate the living room blinds and it'll create perfect movie lighting.
It's also possible to tell Google Home what you want to watch on Netflix, and the television will power up and play the movie.
Need to take a break?
If you feel hungry as you watch your film, it's simple enough to pause it. Just say, "Ok Google, pause Netflix."
If it's dark and you need to turn on the lights in the kitchen, just tell Google or Alexa to turn the lights on.
The breakfast counter
While you're seated on the sofa, just look to the right and you'll see the breakfast counter.
The breakfast counter, under feature lights (which use tungsten bulbs mainly for dramatic effect) acts as a visual "separator" to demarcate the kitchen.
You can watch TV from the breakfast counter too, how convenient.
The view out the window is nice, but you might want to shut the blinds if you're watching a movie.
The kitchen
Walk past the breakfast counter, and you'll enter the "open concept" kitchen.
View of the kitchen from the living room
The kitchen isn't big by any means, but using all-glass sliding doors (with a metal frame) helped make the space feel bigger. Instead of a wall, we used the breakfast counter as a visual separator to demarcate the space.
All-glass sliding doors with a metal frame help make the kitchen feel bigger.
In our kitchen you'll find our washing machine, gas clothes dryer (read our guide and review here) and gas water heater (read our guide and review here). These appliances aren't "smart" devices because they're not internet-connected. But they're definitely smart decisions that improve our lives.
We also use a gas stove and a simple fridge - ordinary appliances that are essential if you cook.
Hidden behind white cupboards are all our crockery and cooking ingredients. Cupboards with doors make all the difference in making a house look neat (as opposed to shelves).
The view of our washing machine, gas clothes dryer and instantaneous gas water heater.
The bedroom
Of course, we designed the house so that the convenience extends to the bedroom.
It's not bed time here yet, but the bed does look enticing.
Let's say you've just washed up and gotten into bed but realise, oh no, you've forgotten to turn the lights off again. In our house, you can just say, "Ok Google, good night."
"Good night," the trusty home assistant replies.
And you'll see three things happening at once, all by themselves:
1.
The warm lights in the room gently dim. You see the city lights glowing outside the window. The hubbub of urban life.
2.
You hear the motors in the blinds whir softly, and you watch as the cream coloured blinds shut out the bright city lights. You feel all ready to sleep.
3.
One last thing - the climate. The air conditioner lets you know it's been activated with two beeps. Cool air fills the room. Before you know it, you've fallen asleep.
In the morning
The view of the bedroom from the bed.
We've programmed the house to wake us up on weekday mornings. At 7.30am, like clockwork, the blinds will open and the alarm will ring. The influx of morning light never fails to wake us up. We've also programmed the air conditioner to automatically turn off, using an IR blaster. That's how we know when it's definitely time to get up. After washing up, if necessary, we can just ask Google Home what's on your calendar that day.
The sunlight streams in after the blinds are opened.
A strange sort of daily ritual we have is to pack up the house a little bit before leaving. We have to remember to pick up anything that's fallen to the ground or our robot vacuum, which is automatically programmed to clean the house daily, might get stuck or knock it around.
The toilet
When you enter the toilet from the bedroom, what will strike you first is the amount of natural light.
Our toilet vanity - lit by natural light.
Natural light does wonders for a toilet - it makes it feel cleaner and enlarges the space. Of course, for privacy, closing the automated blinds is just a voice command away.
We also love our shower ledge, which allows to to place all our washing products conveniently in an aesthetically pleasing way.
A ledge in the shower looks great and is convenient.
But perhaps our favourite smart home component of the toilet is our smart toilet seat. It's an automated Japanese toilet seat that features a deodoriser, an automatic washing system and even varying levels of water pressure and heat.
Our automated Japanese toilet seat.
It's something that you never knew you needed so much until you've tried it. You can read our review of our automated Japanese toilet seat here.
Find out more
We hope you've enjoyed the tour of our house. But this isn't the end. We've also written a feature on what a smart house does. You can read more on Part 2 of our tour of our house - what does a smart home do?