Builder - October 2008 - (Page 51)

DIGITALHOME SMART TECHNOLOGY FOR NEW HOMES ■ EDITED BY DAN DALEY Not the Jetsons It’s more than just a theme park attraction; it’s a living laboratory. hen Disney built its House of Tomorrow in Disneyland in 1957, it was speculating as to what home buyers would see in the way of home technology 30 or 40 years hence. The new House of Tomorrow—known this time as the Innoventions Dream Home, which opened last June at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, Calif.—intentionally peers only ﬁve or so years over the horizon due to the speed of technology change; 60 percent of the home technologies installed there are available today. But it also suggests how home builders will be approaching their work in the future. Disney partnered with builder Taylor Morrison, HP, Lifeware, and Microsoft for the project, a collaboration that Taylor Morrison marketing director Arianna Barrios says is going to be the template for the builder once the current slump ends. “When the home building business returns to growth, we want this experience to position us in a number of ways—to let us better understand not only what buyers want in the way of [home] technology, but also how we’ll build houses around that technology,” she says. W From the builder’s perspective, the Dream Home is a complex focus group outﬁtted as a theme park attraction. Where the previous futuristic home was a carefully scripted guided tour, this iteration allows visitors to stop and interact with the home’s systems, aided by a family of actors who are knowledgeable about the technologies and products. When visitors play with the remotes and other controllers, the input is recorded as data, which will be combined with input from kiosks that ask visitors’ opinions about the house, as well as information from conventional live exit surveys. By the time the ﬁve-year partnership concludes, Barrios says the way houses are designed and built will have changed as a result of the knowledge gained.—D.D. A See Here Now new line of video surveillance products from Home Automation Inc. (HAI) not only has a lot of useful bells and whistles but also WASN’T THE FUTURE GREAT? Disney’s original future house (above) wasn’t interactive, something the new one amply corrects. Automated Green Buyers prefer certain types of green technology. brings a bit of style to video monitoring. The new Network Digital Video Recorder has four channels and can be installed stand-alone to view video via its embedded Web server or used in conjunction with an HAI home control system and viewed on HAI’s touchscreens, over the Internet, or by smartphone. It also ﬁts into HAI’s Universal Mounting Plate, which eliminates the need for shelving and makes installation easier. G reen is a buzzword these days, but it’s not a cure-all, and people perceive its beneﬁts in very different ways. That’s what custom builder Frank Laskey, president of Capital Construction in the Albany, N.Y., suburb of Ballston Spa has learned after going for the green in his homes. “I think you have to look at green as almost a marketing ploy, pure and simple,” Laskey says candidly. “It’s not easy to calculate the real return on investment when you put in energy-saving technology.” Laskey ﬁrst took a green slant on home building in 2004. Along the way, he learned which energyefficient automated systems buyers understood and wanted and which they didn’t. “If the prospective buyers don’t immediately see the value to them of what you’re installing, it just turns them off,” he says. “If we just add [green] features without doing some research, it actually makes it harder to sell the house.” What does sell well, Laskey says, are automation systems that open and close blinds, awnings, and windows as the sun and winds shift. “Anything that makes the house less reliant on the HVAC system is immediately understood,” he says. Another desired feature is the ability to control the home’s environment remotely. Laskey is ﬁnding that while more buyers are going for a certain suite of green technology, they’re beginning to forgo professionally installed home theaters. Laskey now builds each home with certain basic but nondigital environmental attributes including whole-house ventilation, and materials that combine wood and plastic to make the home more durable and lower its maintenance needs. Then buyers can choose from a menu of digital green add-ons.—D.D. Dan Daley is a freelance writer based in Nashville, Tenn. T High Style echnology ﬁrm AMX has opened a showroom in Manhattan’s Times Square that will showcase 350-plus AMX products and nearly 300 third-party products from AMX manufacturer partners. Throughout the showroom, sub-systems are fully integrated with AMX’s Resource Management Suite to demonstrate equipment monitoring and energy management. DO YOU HAVE A TECH STORY? E-MAIL DENISE DERSIN AT: ddersin@hanleywood.com W W W.BUILDERONLINE.COM o c t ober 2 0 08 B U I LD E R ■ 51 http://WWW.BUILDERONLINE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Builder - October 2008

Builder - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Notes B-Mail Book It Missing Links Inside Story Top Shelf Green House Products Digital Home National Beat Seiders' Economy Builder's Choice Where They Stand Hall of Fame: Environments for Life Ad Index Last Word

Builder - October 2008

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