Wi-Fi Wonderland: A Guide to Smart Home Holiday Decorations

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.

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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.

Idaho is not a place that’s often associated with Medieval castles, but a pair have just hit the market for $6.25 million.

The imposing stone structures have towers, turrets, ramparts, arrow-slit windows and even a drawbridge, and might just be the most authentic-looking castles this side of the Atlantic.

“Who expects to see a castle like this in Idaho?” said listing agent Brenda Burk of Coldwell Banker Schneidmiller Realty, who brought the property to the market last week. They are, she said, “extremely unusual.”

Schweitzer Castle and Château de Melusine, as they’re known, stand within Schweitzer Mountain Resort in the Selkirk Mountains and overlook the nearby mountain resort town of Sandpoint. They take in panoramic views of Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho’s largest lake.

The pair of ski-in/ski-out homes each have three bedrooms, two bathrooms and three stories, Burk explained. They are “so authentic,” she said. “Every single stone was handlaid.”

Schweitzer Castle, she said, wasn’t built for “functionality,” but has been modernized and adapted and now has everything a 21st-century residence requires, along with a dungeon, which for some buyers may also be a requisite.

The chateau, meanwhile, has a hot tub room with mountain views, as well as a garage.

The property is being sold furnished, and will come complete with the hand-carved statues, armor, mounted swords, stained-glass windows and a host of antiques dating to the 15th and 16th centuries.

The owner, an antique collector who couldn’t be reached for comment, “is always looking for that hidden jewel and he found that here,” Burk said.

The next custodian is likely to stem from a varied pool of buyers, Burk said, that would include “the trophy-home buyer, someone who can say ‘I own a castle.’”

The property could also appeal to someone looking for a vacation home, or a multi-generational estate, and beyond that “there’s the dreamers,” she said. “We definitely try to market to people who like Medieval history or maybe do Renaissance fairs.”

The seller “really wants it to go to someone with the same passion.”

Wi-Fi Wonderland: A Guide to Smart Home Holiday Decorations

Surround yourself with colourful, connected cheer

The imposing stone structures, with towers, turrets and a hot tub room, lord over the landscape near the mountain resort town of Sandpoint.