Wi-Fi Wonderland: A Guide to Smart Home Holiday Decorations
Surround yourself with colourful, connected cheer
Surround yourself with colourful, connected cheer
It’s the most wonderful time of the year—when you get the opportunity to outfit your home in all manner of illuminated goodness.
Whether you’re a fan of bold decorations or understated elegance, classic or contemporary styles, smart home technology can help you achieve the look—and manage it—with ease.
Below, a few options for high-tech holiday cheer.
Twinkly
Perhaps the name in connected Christmas lighting, Twinkly offers multi-color LED lighting options in a variety of forms—strings, icicles, curtains, clusters—all with clever and convenient smart technology. In addition to providing a palette of over 16 million colours, Twinkly makes it simple for users to get the exact look they want. In addition to offering voice control via Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, Twinkly’s user-friendly app allows owners to program the colours they want down to the exact bulb—even letting them draw and customize the light scheme they desire by tracing with their finger. And if you’re not feeling particularly creative, no worries. Twinkly has a suite of pre-programmed lighting effects and animations that can be simply selected via the app or voice command. And, of course, as you would want from any holiday light, Twinkly lights are IP44-rated weatherproof, making them ideal for indoor or outdoor use.
Twinkly multicolour LEDs range from approx. $70 to $263, depending on size and configuration.
To outfit your home in the sparkle of the season to its best advantage, follow these tips from the design pros https://t.co/5cD8s0yrwd
— Mansion Global (@MansionGlobal) December 14, 2020
AtmosKIT Plus (M1)
Multicolour LEDs aren’t your only opportunity to play with light and magic this holiday season. The AtmosKIT Plus is a ViewSonic M1 short-throw projector that can quickly and easily drape your home in cinematic digital decorations. The endlessly portable projector, which weighs under two pounds and features a built-in, 360-degree smart stand, is capable of projecting on to surfaces 40 to over 100 inches away—and comes with 12 holiday decoration projections, with hundreds more available for download from AtmosFX.com. Or you can find and create your own. The AtmosKIT is able to wirelessly mirror and project anything you can play on an iOS or Android device, meaning you can loop snowflakes falling on your window, or play the entirety of “It’s a Wonderful Life” on your wall.
The AtmosKIT Plus (M1) is available for approx. $448.
Meross Smart WiFi Indoor/Outdoor Plug
The holiday season is all about traditions and perhaps you have some decorations which you use every year; maybe they’ve even been passed across generations. Well, never fear—you, too, can take advantage of smart technology. The Meross Smart WiFi is a dual port, indoor/outdoor plug that works with Apple Homekit, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and can easily handle any of the weather conditions that mark the holiday season in colder climates. In addition to offering users voice control, app control and the ability to schedule when to power on and power off devices, the Meross lets you control each outlet independently—meaning you can power your decorations together, or decide to alternate between various holiday cheer scenes.
The Meross Smart WiFi Indoor/Outdoor Plug is available for around $40.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.