Smart interior design is a new and popular trend. Learn why you should care about this trend and how you can use smart technology to create user-friendly, energy-efficient spaces and increase the value of your interior design projects.

Interior design is all about creating environments that are ergonomic, aesthetically pleasing, and enjoyable to use. Functionality and improved quality of life have always been two key components of interior design. The smart home is a milestone in our ability to interact with and control the spaces we live in.

What are smart home systems?

Smart homes are the "next big thing," like the Internet, cars, and light bulbs once were.

Smart homes are no longer just for turning on music or switching on purple lights in your kitchen.

These days, smart systems can learn your habits and routines and use them to save energy in your home, improve your quality of life, and make your home more efficient. Smart devices can also be components of users' lifestyles. They can be programmed into a family's activities and can work with people's moods to create different atmospheres in certain spaces. This lets you offer your clients highly adaptive and personalized interiors based not only on their general preferences and tastes but also on their schedules and behaviors.

You don't want to ignore the smart home market

The smart industry is growing rapidly, driven by the increasing importance of home monitoring in remote locations, the proliferation of Internet of things, and the general need to save energy. By 2022, it is expected that there will be more than 500 devices per home connected to the Internet. In comparison, in 2015, there were only 8.6 connected devices per home. The number of smart homes in the US is expected to increase tenfold and reach 80.6 million by 2021.As a result, the smart home market is expected to double between 2018 and 2024 and reach USD 44 billion.

Smart interior design trends everyone should know about

Understanding the influence of smart technologies on interior design is key to creating a superior design and providing extra value to your clients, thus giving you an edge over your competitors. Let's delve deeper into smart interior design trends and review some methods for using smart devices to improve your interior design projects.

Human-centric lighting

Lighting plays a crucial role in creating spaces that homeowners enjoy and feel good in. It has a significant influence on our bodies and can affect our moods, concentration, and even appetites. Weak, indirect, and warm lighting tends to make a space seem more peaceful and calm and makes the people in it feel more relaxed. Blue light during the day can give us extra energy and make us more focused on our tasks.

Smart illumination uses pre-set schedules and user habits and activities to ensure the proper atmosphere is set. It gives your clients more control over the comfort of people in their spaces.

Let's take a closer look at the key features of smart lighting:

Group bulbs - Group multiple bulbs in certain areas to provide your clients with more granular control. For example, set different hues and brightness levels for working and relaxing areas.

Create custom scenes - Set the right tone for any kind of activity. Design lighting that perfectly suits movie nights, family parties, or romantic dinners. Your clients simply need to tap a button to activate the settings that suit their particular activities.

Design illumination routines - Use a motion sensor to have a hallway light strip gently turn on when someone walks to the restroom at night. Or use a brightness sensor to dim the lights if there's enough daylight in a room.

Intelligent curtains

As a follow-up to the topic of the crucial influence of light on our moods and well-being, let's touch on smart curtains. Natural light entering a space at the right time can help improve the ambiance and usability of your clients' rooms. Smart curtains use a pre-set schedule, or even sunrise and sunset times, to gently wake your clients with rays of sunlight in the morning or help create a secluded atmosphere for sleep in the evening.

Smart curtains can also make your clients' homes safer. Presence simulation mode opens and closes curtains at random times when nobody's home, so outsiders can't tell when clients are on vacation.

Smart curtains can also help lower energy bills, since they act as a natural barrier that keeps heat in or out of a home. The system uses geolocation data from your client's phone to know when they have left home — that's when it's time to close the curtains. This helps keep heat out in the summer and insulate during the winter.

Invisible multi-room audio

Whether you're working in the garage or cooking in the kitchen, music is a must-have for creating the right atmosphere. But it can sometimes be challenging to integrate audio systems into interior design projects and have them be easy to control.

Using nearly invisible or custom-designed speakers that match designs and decor, your clients can enjoy high-quality music throughout the entire home, as well as outside.

There are no limits to how these systems can be used. For starters, clients can choose to play music in some rooms and not in others. Then they can decide which music to play where: they can play the same audio seamlessly across different rooms or have different audio play in different rooms. Smart audio systems also enable your clients to play music according to a customized routines or scenes. They can stream their favorite music when showering, or catch up on the latest news over breakfast. The whole system is configured and controlled with one easy interface.

Smart appliances

Household chores have never been this interesting. Smart appliances help us get our daily routines done more quickly and easily. Nowadays, you can make coffee, cook a pot roast, or even vacuum the living room remotely with the simple tap of a button.

Some of today's smart appliances are truly remarkable. Samsung smart refrigerators let your clients shop for food, organize their family's schedules, and even see what's inside their fridges remotely, using built-in cameras. There are scanners that attach to your trash can and scan items as you throw them out so they can then be added to your shopping list.

Also note that if you have a client with many non-smart appliances, such as lamps, fans, or small electronics, you can use smart plugs to easily transform them into smart appliances. These plugs are connected to Wi-Fi and can be easily programmed according to customer preferences and then controlled remotely using an app.

Smart homes know what to do

Smart home scenarios are the basis of home automation. They manage how all smart devices in a home work together in different situations. Leaving the house? You can have all the lights, heating, and appliances turn off, and you can set your alarm system to turn on. Time to wake up? Have your curtains open, program music to play gently, and set your coffee maker to start brewing a hot cup of coffee. Smart home scenarios help make your routines easier and give you more time to spend on the things you enjoy.

Scenarios can be used to set up different triggers. For example, you can set the lights in a room to brighten or dim, depending on the amount of natural light coming in. You can also set up scenarios for events such as the doorbell ringing, which might simultaneously send you notifications, rotate security cameras towards the front door, pause multimedia devices, and increase patio light brightness from 20% to 75%.

The smarter devices you have connected to a smart home system, the more efficient and functional the system will be.