They Have Created the Future in Housing--and It’s High-Tech
Imagine using a telephone anywhere in the world to start the fireplace or hot tub at your home.
Sound futuristic? It’s not. Houses are being planned and actually built now with these and other features that seem to belong to the world of Buck Rogers.
Or Superman. Isn’t that where most of us heard of krypton? “We used lasers of krypton, which are brilliant red, and argon, which are blue/green, in a home in Dallas,” lighting expert Tully Weiss said.
Initially, Weiss was called in to illuminate his client’s art collection. “Then we discussed using lasers as an art form,” Weiss recalled. “Usually, you see lasers, as in a disco, moving erratically, but we used them in a stationary way.”
Pioneer in Lasers
The result: colorful, seemingly fixed wall and ceiling patterns in light and, in the living room, what Weiss describes as “the beam-me-up effect,” lights that looked something like those on TV’s long-running sci-fi show “Star Trek,” allowing a character to move from planet to spaceship simply by standing underneath the beam.
Like those TV characters, Weiss was a pioneer when he installed those lasers in the Dallas house. Now that “architectural lighting” has become the subject of an annual show that will be held today through Tuesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and now that Mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed this week “Lighting Week,” Weiss has some followers.
Among them: Malibu builder Wayne Newhouse, who is planning to use lasers in an 11,000-square-foot Laguna Beach house expected to be under construction in July.
Newhouse also expects to use computerized draperies that open and close with the rise and fall of the mercury.
Remote-Control Stereos
“And the beds will rotate, at the push of a button, to catch sight of the fireplace, TV or ocean,” he said. “There will also be a TV screen hooked up to a computer in the kitchen, so recipes can be called up there in a hurry.”
Speaking of screens, Dietmar Kruger’s Ardsley Construction Co. in West Los Angeles has worked extensively with video recorders, both in professional recording studios and in private residences.
“So, say the owner of the house has 10 TV sets and is in the movie business. We’re able to arrange it so he can watch the same program in the kitchen when he makes a sandwich, as is showing in the den, and he can make adjustments (to the tape) at any location,” Kruger said.
Terry Kandel, an electronics expert who works with Ardsley, has installed many sophisticated remote-control systems for stereos as well as for televisions. “So you can change the radio or TV or rewind a disk in different rooms off the same system,” he explained.
“I also installed a TV in the ceiling of a Century City home, and the screen--which is about 50-by-72 inches--goes up and down hydraulically.”
A voice-activated, computerized device that he is hoping to install soon is called “Butler in a Box.” “You give it a name like Seymour, and then you say, ‘Seymour, turn on my lights upstairs.’ And the lights come on,” he said.
“It can wake you up, arm your security system, answer and dial your phone. It will have 32 programmable voice memories and 32 timed memories. So, you can say, ‘Seymour, dial my mother,’ and it will. We think it will be a great device for the handicapped.”
Dimming from a Distance
The device is similar to one that Jim O’Donnell, Ardsley’s plumbing contractor, put in his own home. Using his friend Joe Dallaria’s computer design, O’Donnell built a system that enables him to dim his lights, open his front door, turn off his security alarm and operate many other things through his telephone.
“He just punches in a sequence of numbers on the phone from, say, my office and his lights will dim at his home,” Kruger explained. “He also has a cabin at Lake Arrowhead (where he put in such a device). Before he goes up there, he calls and ‘tells’ the furnace and the lights to go on, so it’s light and warm when he arrives.” Said O’Donnell: “I couldn’t stand walking into a freezing cabin. I had to do something!”
Using the same approach, O’Donnell is installing a hot tub in Sting’s Malibu house so all the rock singer has to do to heat the water when he is in another city is to phone home. And Newhouse plans to use a similar technique to light the fireplaces in the Laguna house.
Such amenities can carry hefty price tags, which until now, only people like Sting could afford. Newhouse’s client is a wealthy real estate developer who owns a 26-passenger jet to take him from his office in Phoenix to his “second home” planned in Laguna Beach. Weiss’s client was an art connoisseur who put no ceiling on what he was willing to spend to light up his collection and to experiment with lasers. The lighting project wound up costing him $300,000.
Few people can buy such costly toys, but there are some products on the market now that operate much like O’Donnell’s and are priced more for the average person.
General Electric makes one called HomeMinder, which the Mission Viejo Co. installed during the past few months in about 100 houses in Southern California as standard equipment.
Harvey Stearn, a senior vice president of the firm, said: “It increased our costs, but this was not reflected in the buyers’ prices.” His company chose HomeMinder because “we’re always looking for good ideas to catch the buyer’s imagination.”
Through HomeMinder, a person can press a button on a small panel called the MiniMinder by the bed and turn on every light in the house. “So if you hear a strange noise in the night, you can flash all the lights to get help or scare off the burglar,” Charles Levine of General Electric in Portsmouth, Va., said in a telephone interview.
Messages on Screen
By phone, a person can operate appliances, heating, cooling and security at home, he said. “So you could drive 40 miles, call home and turn off the hair dryer,” he added.
At home, most anything in the house can be activated by pushing buttons on a panel while watching television. Menus, like those on home computers, serve as visual reminders of what is hooked up to the system. And messages will appear on the screen that are left by phone or while at home.
HomeMinder doesn’t pick up the mail or the newspaper. “We’re working on that,” Levine said with a laugh, “but it can bark like a dog, because you can put a tape on the stereo that sounds like that.”
Gary Bosshart of Homestar Inc. in Irvine, a HomeMinder dealer, calls the system “the ultimate party tool,” because with it, the stereo and lights can be timed to dim and brighten to lead party-goers, for instance, from the swimming pool to the dining room when dinner is ready.
Sells to the Publlic
The Mission Viejo Co. is General Electric’s “focal builder in Southern California right now,” Levine said, “but we’re looking at ultimately also having others.”
Bosshart sells directly to homeowners. “The price depends on size of house and how much you want to control,” he said. He guessed the range would be $1,395 to $5,000. “It can be expanded for voice controls later when they are developed,” he added. Kandel estimated cost of the “Butler in a Box” at $1,200 for the unit and $695 to $895 for “the modulars to make it work.”
There are other systems that work much like HomeMinder. X-10 (USA) of Northvale, N. J., developed a moderately priced unit that, with the help of a personal computer, controls lights, appliances, heaters and most other electrical devices. Hypertek’s “Home Brain” and Unity and Cyberlics systems also use computers but are quite sophisticated, like a system marketed by ISR, and Mitsubishi has a system that requires hard wiring. GE’s invention uses existing power lines.
Wiring Revolution
Wiring itself is undergoing a revolution, though, and the National Assn. of Home Builders, taking its cue from “intelligent office buildings,” is developing a “smart house.”
Simply put, the house will be wired with a single web of cables instead of the tangle of wiring systems that now carry all of a home’s electrical signals. The result is expected to lessen risks of electrical shock and fire.
“A child sticking a screwdriver in an outlet would not get a shock in a smart house,” Pieter VanderWerf, NAHB deputy project director, said.
Not only that, but the “smart house” will have sensors to automatically turn on lights, shut off gas to the house, call the fire department and do other functions, he added. “It will know when I am there and turn on lights when it is dark in a room that I enter.”
Near Future Appearance
It will be able to keep computer memories alive even when power to the house is cut off, he said, and TV screens and stereo speakers can be plugged in anywhere.
When? The year 2000, you say? Nope. VanderWerf expects the smart house to be in production housing by mid-1988, with models around the country in late 1987.
And the cost for the basic wiring and controls will be about $500 more than a conventional electrical system, he said, “although to do some of the really fancy things, you might want to buy the smart-house washing machine and other smart-house appliances.”
