House Design

Home Design for the Smart Home

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Home design for the Smart Home starts right at the planning stage, however it can be installed after the home is built if necessary.  The main thing is to have the wiring in place so that all the latest technology can be installed as the home is built – or even added afterwards. Once the wiring is in place, adding components after the building stage is easy.

Having what is called a Smart Home is not only about entertainment and convenience; it is also about safety. For instance, you can have an alarm for the other end of your driveway that will alert you when any car or person enters the drive. This is good for those homes with long driveways that may not all be visible from the house. Your house alarm can be automatically de-activated as you drive in yourself and reactivated when you leave. The same goes for lights, heating and cooling which can all be automatically switched on or off as you enter and leave.

Smart Lighting and Sound

In fact, Electrician Perth Experts advise that lights can not only be turned on and off remotely, they can be dimmed for an evening or even change colour at the flick of a switch. LED lights can now integrate with this kind of technology.

Smart home design also encompasses things like being able to turn sound on and off and also adjust it and being able to monitor the baby visually and with audio from any room in the house. If you work from home, and are designing your home office, you can have a screen to monitor who is knocking on the door and speak to them without opening it. And of course, you can unlock the door remotely as well.

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Garden Design

7 Tips for Landscape Design

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Landscape Design

Landscape design is all about making the best of your property, whether it is small or large, rectangular or an odd shape, sloping or flat. If you are working out what you want by yourself, the best idea is to take it slowly, especially if you’ve just moved in and are not sure about the prevailing wind direction, soil type or exactly what you want.Landscape DesignIf you rush the process it is highly likely that you will inadvertently make mistakes and some of them can be difficult or costly to fix later on. For instance, planting a tree in the wrong position; you’ll either have to cut it down or have it pulled out. Worse still, if you had concrete or tiles laid somewhere and then found it was not the best spot due to heat or wind.

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House Design, Yacht Design

Why Full Gyms are a Great Design Idea for the Home

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Full gymnasiums have been part of up-market home designs for a while now, but the trend has now spread to luxury yacht design as seen in the yacht Nirvana, designed by Sam Sorgiovanni. Having a gym on board is a great way to get some exercise to stay fit and shed the kilos from those luxury meals, given that the space is limited.

Of course, in a yacht of over 88 metres in length it may not be quite as limited as you first thought. And there are usually one or two swimming pools that can be used for exercise, but what if the weather is too cold for swimming? Head for the gym and get a great workout on all that fine equipment.

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House Design

5 Different Kinds of Outdoor Spaces

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outdoor-spaces

An outdoor space is meant for the whole family to enjoy, giving them a chance to get out in the fresh air after being at work, or at school – or just inside – all day. When work starts early and finishes late you are likely to get mining syndrome; feel like you never see the sun or even the light of day. This is not good for you, but can easily be fixed by creating an outdoor space with comfortable outdoor furniture so you can enjoy being outside in the late evenings or at the weekend.

gazebo

If you come home from work and have to start getting the evening meal almost straight away, your time outside will be minimised. That is why an outdoor area should include a barbecue, a pizza oven or some other means of cooking along with some beautiful decking from Decking Sydney. You can then get everyone outside to enjoy what’s left of the day while dinner is cooking and you can keep an eye on it and the children as well.

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Garden Design

Great Landscape Design and Time for Leisure

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Everyone loves to have some kind of landscaping for their property to enhance their own enjoyment and make the place attractive to others.  However, garden chores are often heavy and time consuming, and if you work all day you might prefer to keep your weekends for playing sport or just relaxing rather than weeding, mowing and doing all of those other  never-ending gardening chores. There are several ways you can have the best of both worlds; great landscaping and time for leisure as well. How?

Lower the Maintenance

First off, you need to plan your garden to be a low maintenance one. This means forget the annuals that are so showy and need to be planted, watered and weeded every season. Instead, find perennials or permanent shrubs and bushes that offer attractive flowers, seedpods, autumn foliage and bark so that your garden will have something of interest in it all year round. If you dearly love annuals, grow a few in pots that are quick and easy to replace. Garden Design Photo Courtesy of LandscapesWA

Low Maintenance Landscaping Ideas

Shape Rather Than Colour

Think in terms of shape and different shades of green to give the visual interest you need. Have plants with narrow, spiky leaves, fat round leaves, tiny oval leaves – and so on. Many plants have multi-coloured or variegated leaves and flowers and new leaf growth that is pink. Have tall and short, erect and weeping types of plants; deciduous and evergreen. Choose trees and shrubs that do not have large seedpods to drop over your lawn and look untidy. Read more: Deciduous and Evergreen Trees

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House Design

The Importance of Good Lighting in the Bedroom

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Bedroom-Lighting

These days when space is often at a premium in the home, the bedroom can be used for more than just sleeping, so long as there is good lighting in there.  With the addition of a simple easy chair or sofa and a small side table, you can use it for doing craft, reading or just relaxing. It would also be a good place from which to make private phone calls.

So what kind of lighting do you need? It all depends on what you want to do and what is there already.  You may have plenty of natural lighting, but this won’t help in the night time when you want to read. At the very least you’ll need bedside lamps, but these may not cast enough light for doing fine work.  Here are some points to consider before you start changing the lighting.

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House Design

5 Different Gazebo Design Styles

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Gazebo Design

A gazebo as opposed to an outdoor patio is a structure that stands apart from the house and is usually located somewhere in the garden to create a focal point. The idea of having a gazebo is that it gives you a place from which to enjoy the outdoors while still having some kind of comfort and shelter. Perhaps you want to recreate a holiday feel in your backyard similar to what you may have enjoyed at a luxury Bali villa or some other exotic location.

The roof is shelter from the hot sun and sudden shower, while the furniture inside – whether comfortable sofa or plain bench – offers a place to sit and rest for a while. It is up to you what kind of gazebo you have and what you have inside it.

Gazebo Design

Gazebo Design

Here are 5 different styles of gazebo you might like to choose from.

  • Octagonal or hexagonal. These are the two most popular shapes for gazebos, though they can be oval, square, rectangle or even round. The round one is not considered to be efficient in what you can fit into it for the size, however it may suit your purposes better than the others.
  • Another distinction between gazebos is what they are built from. You can choose almost any type of building material, with timber being one of the most common and popular. There is also powder coated aluminium, steel or even plastic. Metal gazebos are almost maintenance free which is why they are popular. Timber must be treated to prevent rot and warping, but it gives a timeless look in many different styles that is always popular.
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