You don’t have to be a celebrity to enjoy the benefits of a multi-functional smart home. Google or Alexa devices that allow users to control their lighting with their voice are readily affordable, while security systems with CCTV that can be monitored from anywhere in the world are increasingly common.
Advances in technology have made smart homes more affordable in recent years, but it may surprise you to learn that smart homes have been around far longer than you think. The earliest smart home or home automation invention, was the creation of the mechanical thermostat.
The first mechanical thermostat was invented way back in 1830, but it wasn’t until 1920 that it became commercially available. Its success helped pave the way for the technologically advanced smart homes we know today, with home owners now controlling their heating via apps on their smart phones.
Patrick Mahomes
Of course, the rich and famous are well-known for building their own luxury mansions and incorporating all the very latest technology with no expense spared. Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes mega mansion sits on 8 acres of land in Belton, Missouri, and features a private football field, a par-3 golf hole, an indoor basketball court, resort-style pool, private pond, and a whole lot more.
Unsurprisingly, it also includes a lot of high-end smart home tech. These include automated pool heating, water filtration management, and integrated outdoor sound systems that surround the pool, hot tub, and private pond areas.
Centralized smart hubs that control integrated multi-zone climate settings, smart lighting schedules, and interconnected property utilities. Automated private security gates, smart surveillance cameras, and sensor-based alert systems that monitor the property’s perimeter.
There’s also a full-size indoor basketball court with built-in acoustics and lighting setups, plus an automated, temperature-and-humidity-regulated wine cellar to keep his expensive bottle collection safe.
With three Super Bowl titles and a sustained run of success under Patrick Mahomes, expectations in Kansas City remain as high as ever. The Chiefs enter every season with championship ambitions, but maintaining that standard is increasingly difficult as rival contenders strengthen across the AFC. Questions surrounding schedule difficulty, roster changes, and the challenge of returning to the top all contribute to the debate about where Kansas City stands among the league’s elite. If you view NFL odds on the DraftKings Platform, you’ll see the Chiefs aren’t among the favorites to win the Super Bowl, but with a home like this and three championship rings, Mahomes is already the envy of every player in the NFL.
Bill Gates
Billionaire Bill Gates is no stranger to innovation, so it’s no surprise that the Microsoft founder has invested heavily in smart home technology in his Washington mansion. Naturally it features all the very latest gadgets, but perhaps the most impressive features include floor sensors that enable the security system to know who is in the house based on their weight.
These same floor sensors are also used to enable you to listen to your favorite playlist wherever you are in the building. The technology detects movement and automatically makes the song follow you all around the house. This even includes the swimming pool, so you can swim and splash around to the soundtrack of your choice.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah’s $14m home in Telluride, Colorado, features a hot tub, home theatre, guest house, and even an underground wine mine, but its smart home features are equally impressive. The driveway has sensors that can detect visitors while snowfall is swiftly melted away by the heated drive. A big gardening fan, Oprah’s ensured she can also remotely water her plants while she’s away.
Tom Brady
The seven-time Super Bowl winner’s Indian Creek Island compound in Miami, is a 25,000-square-foot waterfront estate that sits at the edge of Biscayne Bay. Brady is known for using Smart Home tech in many of his homes, with a focus on recovery, comfort, and entertainment all key elements of the design.
That means incorporating smart home features such as climate zones, indoor and outdoor sound systems, LED lighting zones, motorized window shades, and remote-controlled heating and cooling for the pool and spa. While circadian lighting, air quality monitoring, whole-home water purification, and temperature-controlled sleep environments also feature.
Smart Home Software Brands
The three biggest brands competing on the celebrity market right now are Crestron, Savant, and Control4. However, the proliferation of smart phones and faster Wi-Fi speeds has seen more and more people embracing the smart home benefits of convenience, security, and simplicity. What was once confined to the rich and famous is now affordable for many, creating a growing, innovative market that promises an exciting future for all home owners.
The Future of Smart Homes
Smart Homes have come a long way since the invention of the mechanical thermostat. However, the advent of AI (artificial intelligence) will see smart home innovation take a giant leap forward. Future homes will take decisions based on user behavior, the time of day, weather patterns, breaking news, security alerts, and even the contents of your refrigerator.
AI smart kitchens will feature refrigerators that can recognize the items inside it and suggest recipes, track expiration dates, and even order more groceries. New generative AI Assistants featuring Large Language Models such as Google’s Gemini will replace the current basic voice commands used in Siri and Alexa, creating conversational AI personal assistants with predictive intelligence. While home-based Robotics are also tantalizingly close.
Smart homes of the future promise days free from the clutter of decisions and household chores, creating a secure, safe, stress-free space that’s focused on the needs and wellbeing of the family that’s living inside it.
Norvain Zyphoris has opinions about home design inspirations. Informed ones, backed by real experience — but opinions nonetheless, and they doesn't try to disguise them as neutral observation. They thinks a lot of what gets written about Home Design Inspirations, DIY Home Projects, Gardening and Landscaping Ideas is either too cautious to be useful or too confident to be credible, and they's work tends to sit deliberately in the space between those two failure modes.
Reading Norvain's pieces, you get the sense of someone who has thought about this stuff seriously and arrived at actual conclusions — not just collected a range of perspectives and declined to pick one. That can be uncomfortable when they lands on something you disagree with. It's also why the writing is worth engaging with. Norvain isn't interested in telling people what they want to hear. They is interested in telling them what they actually thinks, with enough reasoning behind it that you can push back if you want to. That kind of intellectual honesty is rarer than it should be.
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