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What Would Be Your Ideal Futuristic Home?
deman1985 asks: "As the owner of a small commercial and home integration company, I'm exposed to a wide variety of customers with differing tastes and needs. I'll get requests for anything from the ordinary audio distribution systems and full home theater systems, to downright bizarre requests like having bubble baths run automatically, when they walk in the door. However, the vast majority of customers I encounter are not technologically inclined and are more interested in simplicity rather than impressiveness. What would your ideal integrated home look like? What's the most unique feature you would like to see? If you had access to an unlimited budget, what would you spend money on to make your home stand out? Whole-house audio? Hidden video screens? Automatic locks? Do most people view home integration strictly as a toy for entertainment, or is the technology ready for prime time?"
I wouldn't want a complete turn-key solution, I'd want to have the infrastructure in place so that I could tinker as I chose.
My new house would have a wiring closet/server room that would be the electronic equivalent of the furnace/AC/water heater room. There would be racks and/or cabinets for various computers and A/V equipment. The room would be properly ventilated. The house would be wired to hell and back before walls went up.
Then leave me to my devices. I'll handle the rest!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
A touch screen near the door that allowed me to walk in, and pick from a simple list of pre-programmed profiles for lights, music, and TV.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
But the thing about it all that bothers me, is that it is all dependent on the precarious infrastructure for power and telecom. I would love to have solar and wind power backup.
Get yerself an RTGs for your back up power needs.
Tech != electronics (at least not exclusively). I want pneumatic tubes to deliver items across the house, powered lifts, etc. ;)
I wouldn't mind a bit of green tech, either - houses designed with big south facing windows and large eaves to let in lots of sunlight in the winter but little in the summer, perhaps solar water heating, perhaps a heat pump, perhaps a wind turbine if in a windy area, etc. For really esoteric, on a big house you could go with a solar thermal evaporative cooler/heater: noiseless, takes no power, and has no moving parts except for the fan; heating and cooling are done by the same device.
As a gardener, an automated greenhouse would be neat (maintains temperature with opening and closing of flaps, and an internal heater if needed).
By a scallop's forelocks!
Considering that the first things I did when I moved into my house were to build a movie theater in the attic and wire the whole house for audio, video, and Internet, I'm definitely in your target market ;-).
Here are the things I would love to have but am too lazy to have actually gotten around to:
The ability to wirelessly stream TV from any of my DVRs to any of my laptops.
Ringing the doorbell should automatically pause any television, movies, or music playing and bring up the front (or side) door-cam
Similarly, video and audio should pause when the phone rings.
Be able to use any device in my house as the source for my whole-house audio-video system (currently only the devices in my living room system can function as sources).
I want a security system that allows me to check the status of my house (hopefully including seeing pictures) from an internet connection. I travel a lot, and it would make me feel better to be able to see that everything is okay.
And some general comments:
After playing around with a bunch of universal remotes, I can categorically state that the Home Theater Master MX-850 (Aeros) is my favorite. I have played with a bunch of high-end touchscreens like Crestrons, and actually have a HTM MX-3000 for my theater, but I find that the "wow!" factor is offset by the day-to-day reality that hard-buttoned remotes are easier to live with.
I don't give a rats' ass about having video screens hidden. I paid a lot of money for my plasma screens, and I'm perfectly okay with having people able to see them. However, while I don't want to hide them, I am perfectly okay with disguising them. I would love to have my main plasma framed so that it looked like a painting on the wall, and I think the ones that look like mirrors when they are off are awesome as well.
I do like to have video in unusual places. I have a high-def TV mounted over the master bathtub which can receive audio and video from the whole-house network. We don't use it very often, but it's great for escaping from reality for a little while. Similarly, I would like to eventually have a weatherproof TV mounted next to my hot tub.
I guess basically the bottom line is that I want to be able to get my video and audio from any device to any device easily. I am unfortunately very busy, and really don't have a lot of time to watch TV or movies -- so being able to fire up a recorded copy "The Simpsons" on my laptop (without the bother of downloading a torrent or ripping a DVD) would make it easier for me to enjoy those few minutes I do have.
Now, that said, I have no intention of actually work with a company like yours. I mean no offense, but in my experience, installation companies like to choose absolutely ridiculously expensive equipment and spend far too much time trying to maximize their profits. The simple fact is that in many cases white paint (cost: $20) provides a projection surface superior to even the much-vaunted Stewart Firehawk (cost: $thousands), and yet I don't think there is a theater company in the world that would actually admit that.
My screen (160" with an Infocus 7205) is white paint. Sherwin Williams Ultrapaint, to be precise. It looks like a real screen, because I have the projection surface framed off with duvetyne tape and the rest of the wall painted dark blue, and I have had very knowledgeable people comment that it's the best image they have ever seen. And it's just white paint. Similarly, my DVD player cost me $50. The output is completely and utterly indistinguishable from a $1500 Denon (and yes, we have run blind tests -- nobody could tell the difference). So I'm very jaded about the home theater industry in general.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
As EVERY good geek shold know Alton Brown shold design the kitchen to be mulitasked, and well hacked.
My plan when I went looking for the place I eventually bought was to make sure the bedroom was empty. Have a rectangular room a big wooden four-pster bed in it and nothing else.
Real life interfered a lot, so I have to have clothes, books, and even a computer desk in there at the moment - but one day I will own a house which has a room which is literally just a bed-room.
Perfect for reading/cuddling/relaxing in. With nothing to distract or tidy.
Yes! I see all of this stuff about monster technology and all the rest, and I'm realizing that even though I'm a nerd who has 5 computers in my living room, I've spent a lot of time getting as much of that stuff out of my house, or at least as unobtrusive, as possible. And those five computers are as hidden as I can make them (three are laptops, one is a small server in my stereo cabinet, the display for the desktop is an LCD in a bookshelf with a pull-out drawer for the keyboard and mouse). I want much of my furniture, especially anything holding computers or whatnot, to be fold away and to have blank faces when it's closed (I've already built myself such a workbench, it's just a large cabinet in my livingroom when I'm not working on stuff).
Lots of shelves/cabinets and lots of storage, I've got gobs of projects and parts for projects, and I want to keep them organized and close to my life, but I don't want to have to have separate spaces for entertaining and for living, 'cause that's just spending money on half-used space. I haven't actually lived in or used a house with these amenities, but since a lot of projects seem to happen on the floor anyway, I think I'd like hatches or similar floor storage.
However, no unnecessary nooks or hallways or connectors, I want my rooms rectangular, easy to clean, with simple openings between spaces. If the climate demands it (and most do), I like to compartmentalize the house for heating and cooling (and maybe here's your application for technology, a centralized place that I can say "heat the living room, let the dining room and bedroom sit at 50 degrees"), but I don't buy into this crap that some architects push about hallways to provide transition areas in between parts of the house. Make it a door or an opening with a curtain and be done with it.
I don't need a large kitchen, but I want prep room on both sides of the stove, and a veggie sink as well as a clean-up sink. Whatever the entrance to the house, I want a little space, maybe just a few feet of hall, with shelves for shoes by the front door.
Technology-wise, the only really geeky thing I want is a smarter cat door (Yes, I know about Flo Control, but I'd settle for "after dark, opens from the inside only"). I want room to run cables under the floor and through walls, as I'm sick of slap-dash phone/cable installations run under the siding around the outside of the house, and I want lots of power outlets, but I'm less concerned with built-in lights or any fancy technology to switch them; I'm fine with having desk lamps and similar per-application lamps. Don't build crap into the house, as it'll only be made obsolete (and this especially applies to lighting technologies right now). If you do have built in lights, they should be able to make that room like daylight; my alarm clock is currently a big bank of daylight balanced flourescents, and when that lights up the room I'm happy, even in the doldrums of the rainy season.
I want good fitting doors, double-paned glass, good insulation (for conventional construction types, I'm interested in the folks doing 2x6 studs at 19.whatever centers, more room for insulation, cheaper materials costs). Yes, I know that a house needs to breathe, but let's make that a specific function of the design, not a byproduct of skimping on materials.
And, if I go specific to my particular needs, parking for a bunch of bicycles out of the elements, including long ones (tandem/recumbent).
All this rock moving required years of heavy equipment operations. The construction site looked like a mall was going in. All this rock had to be not only placed, but anchored; the house is near the San Andreas fault.
The house is on Mountain Home Road in Woodside, recognizable by the gatehouse that looks like a Japanese teahouse. In the end, it looks rather modest; it just has a landscape that belongs to a rockier area.
So that's a real dream house, built for someone with a mania for big rocks.
I'm just a geek, not a home-automation expert, but the house I've been designing (for when I'm rich and/or famous) will have quite a bit of (in my opinion) useful automation (In no particular order):
... And so it comes to this.
Exactly! I attended a speech here not to long ago by someone who had built their own earthship. Essentially the idea is to pack sand in tires for thick mass around 3 walls and then face the sun with a wall of windows and the house regulates its own temperatures. They built their home (somewhere in the 2000-3000 sqrft size range) for $40,000 CDN. The house regulates its own temperature from outdoor conditions of -40C to +30C here in Ontario. They use a composting toilet, well water with a waste water system using plants, woodstove and solar power (including computers). For $40k (they say they could do it for $30K knowing what they know now) they are completely off the grid and as a bonus financially independent other than property taxes. As an interesting aside in some municipalities your property taxes are based on the amount of greenspace your house takes up and since the roof of the house is actually earth and grass you loose no greenspace....
Anyway, this my new dream home. As it is completely self-sufficient, low cost, and there have been many projects to show that you don't have to sacrifice luxery (including running many computers and HDTVs and the like) when living in this sort of home. About the only trouble seems to be getting building permits (did I meantion they are certified earthquake safe in california?) Many of them are very gorgeous as well. I would recommend checking out earthship.org for examples.
The house of tomorrow looks an awful lot like the house of yesterday. I'm a homeowner, so I can pass along some of my own observations about how I would change my house if I had the chance:
1. Insulate, insulate, insulate. You can never insulate too well. Even if you think you've insulated well enough for thermal control, extra insulation is also sound deadening, which is nice. While you're at it, seal up the house really well. BUT if you do that, make sure you install a heat-exchanger venting system to replace the house air. This isn't so much a health issue as much as it is an aesthetic one. When you drop a deuce in the master bath, a well sealed house will help make the, uh, memories linger unless you are changing out the air. And leaving the bathroom window open on a cold, rainy night is never a great plan.
2. Put the laundry "room" (alcove, closet, whatever) near the master bedroom. It takes some extra work and some extra space, but you'll thank me. Especially if you have a two story house. You didn't install the dishwasher in the garage, did you?
3. Nice big conduits to every room for low voltage / communications wiring. Yes, for today I want 2 cat 5 and 2 RG6, but what about tomorrow?
4. Oversize the utility inputs as much as you can. We swapped out our stove/oven for a gas model. This required bringing a second gas line in through the garage - a fairly ugly hack. It would have been much better to future-proof this up front.
5. Tankless water heater. More reliable and longer lasting, more energy efficient, more graceful failure mode. Who can argue with that?
6. A basement. Obviously in some places this is actually required to insure the foundation is below the frost line, but even in Silicon Valley I'd like to have one for storage and to make repairs and improvements easier. We have a crawl space. It's not so nice. If you have a basement and a single story, then you probably can strike out #3 above.
7. Attic stairs / finished attic. The trend nowadays in making your house bigger is to replace the attic with a 2nd story. The 2nd story winds up with rooms with angled ceilings and the like, and you don't get to have an attic at all. We don't have a big family, so we don't really need that. But we are storage-poor, so it would be really helpful to be able to conveniently use the giant, cavernous triangle above the ceiling to store stuff.
8. If you go with 2 stories, try and arrange to have a pair of closets vertically lined up. If your health declines as you get older (a house is a long term investment, mind you), you can convert them into an elevator.
9. Every (non Amish) modern house in America has a home theater. The only difference is how nice it is. A 23" TV in the den is the home theater if that's where you watch TV. I'm not saying you should plan your house around home theater, but if you know some of the rules of good theater design, you can decide how many of them you can try and incorporate in the place where the TV goes:
A. Sunlight is the enemy of your TV. The room doesn't have to be windowless, but try and avoid large picture windows facing West or South.
B. The distance between the screen and your eyes ideally should be about 2-3 times the height of the screen (at least, if we're talking about high definition TV. Sit further away, and you'll lose all of the extra detail you paid for when you bought an HD set).
10. Let nature help your HVAC situation. Plant deciduous trees to the south. In the summer, they'll shade the house. In the winter, they'll drop their leaves and let the sun through to warm you. Plant evergreens between your house and the prevailing winter wind (usually from the North).