The digital age has become all about interconnectivity, with smart homes taking over more and more households. Google, Amazon, and Apple smart products are leading the market, which now has a global value of roughly $140 billion. Experts predict that by the end of 2024, there will be more than 400 million smart homes.
If you’re looking to start your home automation ecosystem, the bedroom is a great place to start. This is the space where convenience, relaxation, and ambiance are most important because they impact your sleep quality. This guide should help jumpstart your journey as you curate your own smart bedroom.
Marrying Hi-Tech Convenience with Natural Comfort
First, you want to consider how you can smoothly implement tech into your bedroom while frontloading natural comfort. Just because you have lots of tech doesn’t mean it has to overwhelm your room visually. If you have products laid out in an intrusive way, they will end up looking too busy and hampering you instead of servicing you.
An excellent way to avoid this is by choosing specific pieces to build around. Since sleep is the critical factor here, you can start with your bed and choose which devices to connect after. The California king bedroom sets from Living Spaces use natural wood panels and pieces in different colors and interior styles while making space for devices and connectivity. The Hillsboro set, for starters, uses dovetail construction for extra durability and comes with built-in USB ports in the nightstand and storage footboard. Wood, stone, and some greenery will give you an excellent base to tie your smart devices into.
Cable management boxes can be retrofitted into your walls if you want to keep cables concealed, and you can match any speakers and media consoles to the color palette of your interiors. Starting with your bed area ensures a central point and prioritizes your comfort. This also provides a suitable pathway for installing controllers and connectivity extenders.
Picking the Right Smart Gadgets
Once you’ve created a balanced layout, you will need to pick gadgets that fit your priorities. Do you care more about controlling the internal climate? Do you engage with a lot of media before bedtime? Is lighting your main concern?
There are now a host of smart devices that can help you control lighting, windows, temperature, music, cameras, and streaming gadgets. To ensure compatibility, you should go for a smart home hub. This keeps things centralized within one ecosystem, so you know everything will work together, and you can control them all from one app or device.
You can even use voice commands to control different devices, even if they are from different brands. An option that should generally work well is the Amazon Echo, as it is inherently built to be used with the virtual assistant Alexa. Because of its popularity and accessibility, it shouldn’t be hard to find smart products that work with Alexa. Even products that aren’t Alexa-certified can be calibrated to work using smart home skill features.
Being Smart with Lighting
Lighting is the most significant factor in controlling your room’s ambiance. Your brain responds to the light around you, affecting how deep your sleep can get. Even the color tones of your lighting impact your perception and how your body regulates its circadian rhythm. The new Hue Twilight from Phillips Hue is a smart sunrise lamp designed to mimic sunrise and sunset to help you wake and sleep naturally. You can adjust the light directly or set wake-up automation with two light sources from the Hue app. This lets you adjust brightness and the speed with which the lamp brightens over time if you want more precise control over your sleep and wake cycle.
Many smart bulbs work with different lamp styles to fit your aesthetic, and you can even get a variety of fixtures to curate your space. Light strips and overhead lights may provide different vibes depending on what you plan to do and what time you are adjusting to.