As much as furniture or décor, the lighting in your home plays a big role in setting the atmosphere. Whether you like dentist-office alert or late-night-diner dark, traditional lighting options abound for setting the mood. But even now a whole new wave of home lighting technologies are changing not only the way our homes look but also how we live within and interact with them. Don’t be in the dark. Catch up on your home lighting trends before deciding on the best way to set your home aglow.
The days of turning on one light at a time are quickly flickering out. The buzz phrase these days is “zone lighting.” Why be bothered with walking from lamp to lamp when you can simply press a button and toggle lighting schemes for a whole room or even your whole home. Like sitting in a luxury car, teach your home to remember your preferences and adapt accordingly. The time savings is negligible, but the cool factor is perhaps worth the extra money. Professional installation can be costly, but there are all sorts of DIY versions taking over.
If pressing a button seems far too low tech, there is a new option, and it will make you feel the way you did the first time you used a smartphone. New, relatively inexpensive devices are now hitting the market that will synchronize all the connected devices in your home with a simple voice-recognition interface. Imagine walking in the door from work and saying, “Turn the living room lights on and dim to six and go ahead and turn on the bathroom lights, please.” And then, voila, Jetsons!
These new devices, which are only a fraction the cost of professionally installed home lighting systems, are just finding their way into homes, but the implications are exciting, and the experience alone can be worth the cost. But if you are a bit more old school, and robot voice-activated lighting isn’t your thing, there is plenty of traditional-looking new tech, mostly in the form of new bulb technologies, that allow you to change light colors and intensity with single bulbs that can last decades.
While you consider life in a Jetsons-style home, consider United Built Homes to be your partner in planning, designing and building your dream home. Whatever style you like, whatever hi-tech or low-tech preferences you have, we can make sure you get what you want.
