For a few years my apartment in Paris was, by the standards of the technology industry, extremely smart. The lights responded to my voice, the thermostat learned my habits, the speakers followed me from room to room, and the front door could be unlocked from a train in another country. It was also, I began to notice, exhausting. Things beeped. Things updated at midnight. Small coloured lights glowed on every shelf, like a constellation of needy pets.
The promise of the smart home was always ease, a house that anticipated its occupants and smoothed away friction. The reality, for many people, has been a new kind of domestic labour: managing apps, resetting hubs, apologising to guests who cannot work the lights. Worse, the devices themselves tend to be ugly, designed to be noticed on a shop shelf rather than to live quietly among the objects we actually love.
A handful of designers are trying to change that. In Oslo, the studio Kvist builds furniture with technology concealed inside it: sideboards with speakers hidden behind oiled oak slats, lamps that dim gradually at sunset without instruction, and a coat rack that quietly lowers the heating when the last coat leaves. Maja Brenden, who founded the studio after years designing consumer electronics, describes her aim as removing every reason to reach for a phone.
Designing for absence
The guiding principle, Brenden told me, is that a room should work perfectly for someone who has never seen it before. That rules out voice commands, which guests find awkward, and most apps, which require downloading and patience. Instead, Kvist relies on physical controls, a brass dial, a linen-covered switch, combined with a small amount of genuinely useful automation. The intelligence is there, she says, but it has good manners and keeps its opinions to itself.
The best technology in a home is the kind your grandmother could use and your architect would never notice. — Maja Brenden
Others are thinking along similar lines. A small audio company in the Netherlands, Lindholt, makes speakers that resemble pieces of sculpture and contain no microphones at all, an absence it advertises as a feature. Architects increasingly ask for wiring to be hidden entirely within walls and joinery, and for sensors to be placed where nobody will ever see them. Luxury, in this world, is measured by what you cannot see, and by how little you have to think.
There is a privacy argument here too, and it is not a minor one. A home filled with listening devices is a home that generates data, much of which ends up far beyond its walls. The quieter smart home tends to process everything locally, if it collects anything at all. Brenden's systems store nothing online and can be operated entirely without an internet connection, which she regards as the only honest arrangement for a place where people sleep.
I have not rebuilt my apartment, not yet. But I have unplugged the speakers that listened, replaced the chirping hub with a simple timer, and bought a single lamp that fades to amber at dusk without being asked. The rooms are quieter now, and oddly larger. I had forgotten how much space a silence takes up, and how pleasant it is to live with things that do their work without wanting to be thanked.
