We recently had to move to a new community. Not out of desire. We loved the old place. Structural necessity. A few weeks notice. So we moved. To a new house, new surroundings, new conversations.
Part of the new place: for the first time in my life, we have a smart lock. Two security cameras at the door. I’ve been designing these things into every client’s villa for years. Now I’m the one living behind them.
We got to talking about it one evening. About how far the systems go on the projects I work on. Millions of dirhams on lighting scenes, motorised curtains, cameras, panels. The whole house condensed into a single tap.
My eighteen-year-old daughter heard me out. Then she said this. I’m keeping close to her words because they landed better than anything I would have written.
It takes a little bit away from your life. The everyday things. Opening your curtains. Turning off the lights at night. Turning them all back on. Those give value to your life. You’re actually doing something. Just sitting down and pressing a remote takes that away. You want to be walking around the house with a purpose. It’s kind of pointless to have home automation like that.
I told her in the moment it was a cute perspective. That was the surface read.
The longer one has been landing on me since.
She’d put her finger on the thing the entire smart-home industry refuses to admit. Not all friction is waste. Some of it is what makes a house yours. You move through your rooms with small purposes on the way through the day. Open a curtain. Turn on a lamp. Walk to the switch and press it before you get into bed. The house responds to you and you respond to it, and the sum of those small answered instructions is the thing we’ve been calling home.
Automate all of that away and you haven’t saved time. You’ve deleted it.
The ritual Suri was picturing was mine. At night, I walk through the house turning off the lights. That walk takes me into my children’s rooms. I go in to switch off a light, and while I’m there, I catch the day on their face. We have the thirty-second conversation neither of us planned. I notice they’re still awake and I sit on the edge of the bed for a minute.
None of that was the reason I went in. Turning off the light was the reason. But the light switch carried me across the threshold, and everything else happened because I was already standing there.
That, I keep coming back to, is what automation actually costs. Not the task. The pretext.
If the lights go off by themselves, I have no reason to open that door. And I would never notice the loss, because no one ever decides “I’ll keep manual switches so I stay close to my children.” It just goes. The door I would have opened stays closed. The small conversation never happens. The memory that would have been made simply isn’t. There’s no alert on any panel to tell you it’s missing.
The friction we’re so eager to design out of a home is sometimes the last structural reason two people end up in the same room. A house full of small, necessary crossings is a house where you keep bumping into the people you love. Smooth every crossing away and everyone glides off to their own corner. Perfectly comfortable. Perfectly efficient. A little more alone every night.
The villas I work on are in an automation arms race. Good morning: the curtains open themselves. Good night: one press turns off every light in the house. The promise is that the house does everything for you and you never lift a finger again.
I’ve stopped asking clients what we can automate. It’s the wrong question, and it always leads to the same answer: everything. The better question is what should stay in your hands, because the doing is the point.
Automate the friction no one will ever miss. The climate. The security that’s actually about safety. The tedious things. The smart lock at our door doesn’t cost me a thing. I don’t miss digging for keys.
Protect the small purposes. The switch on the wall in the room where your child is falling asleep is different. That one isn’t about the light.
I think about the fact that this came from her. Eighteen, about to leave for university on the other side of the world, telling me that pressing a remote takes the value out of life. She wasn’t giving me a design principle. She was telling me she can see what the small purposes have added up to. And she doesn’t want the house to do them for her.
I’ll be leaving that switch exactly where it is. And my conversations with clients about home automation will look a lot different now.
Related on the studio Substack: What Real Luxury Actually Is · Lit For The Person · After the Handover
Studio SuCo. A founder-led residential design practice in Dubai. 25 years. Two to four projects at a time. From shell and core to handover.
Designed with intention, delivered with care.
studiosuco.com · @studiosuco · [email protected]
