With millions of colors available in one smart bulb and endless settings possible through an app, illuminating a home has become more customizable—and exciting—than ever before. That’s why we worked with Cync smart home team to make sure the lighting throughout the 2021 House Beautiful Whole Home in Fredericksburg, Texas, was as intelligent and beautiful as the interiors our designers created for it.
Watch the video above and read on to find out how you can amp up your lighting options in your own house.
When it comes to personalizing your home, lighting has often been lower on the list than, say, furniture, artwork, or paint. That’s changing, though. “Lighting is the new jewelry of the home,” says Tim Stumm, a lighting expert with the American Lighting Association. “Where it used to be utility, now it’s fashion.”
Yes, fixtures are a big part of that evolution, with leveled-up design, variety, and flexibility in everything from sleek wall sconces to sculptural pendant lamps. But bulbs and switches are equally, if not more, advanced these days, and offer some fantastic opportunities for personalizing your home.
We asked Strumm, along with the experts at GE Lighting, a Savant company and manufacturer of Cync smart home products, to let us in on easy ways to give your home a more custom look with these new technologies.
Set the "Scene"
The first thing to consider when upgrading to a smart home is that the products can be personalized and tailored to your own specific needs. All the lights in your home can turn on exactly how you want them to, and when you want them to, by the click of an app, flip of a switch, or a verbal command when paired with your home’s voice assistant.
“Imagine you’re running around getting ready to host a party,” says Strumm. “Instead of going from room to room turning on lights, you can just say ‘Hey, Google, set the lights to entertainment mode.’” These preprogrammed settings are known as “lighting scenes,” and there’s no end to the customized schemes you can create. In the kitchen, you might have one bright scene for meal prep and another, softer one for dining. You can have lighting that’s white and sharp for cleaning in the TV room or toned-down for movie night. Creating a scene that slowly dims the lights in your child’s bedroom over a 30-minute period could help your little one get to sleep easier too.
A simple way to do this is to install smart switches throughout the home. This allows you to create a scene for any light fixtures on that circuit, as long as they use smart or traditional dimmable bulbs. A good choice here? Cync’s wired and wireless switches, which are not only easy to install but also allow you to group multiple switches through the Cync app, even if they’re on different circuits. That means you can create custom scenes to activate throughout the whole house.
Expand Your Palette
When the dimmer switch debuted in 1959, it revolutionized residential lighting by allowing homeowners to adjust light levels in a room. Color-changing LED lights are the next quantum leap, enabling you to illuminate a room in the hue of your choice. (How about a moody purple for the home theater or a fiery red for a cocktail party in the living room?) When you need to go back to basic white light, it’s just a click away.
The Cync Full Color Smart Light Bulb is an affordable way to add millions of colors— in addition to a full spectrum of white—to your home’s palette. With Cync’s Direct Connect technology, they’re programmable from the brand’s smartphone app so you don’t have to buy a separate hub.
Cync Light Strips are another great option. Just cut the strips to fit your space—perhaps under your kitchen cabinets or around a flat-screen TV—and then fasten them in place with the peel-and-stick backing. The same Cync app enables you to set and save your favorite colors and tones, so creating the perfect mood is always just a swipe away.
Speak Up
By connecting your smart lights to your Amazon Echo or Google Home Mini, you can use voice control for any lighting needs—a time-saver for everyone, and a particularly helpful feature for homeowners with limited mobility. You can also make using your smart lights more organic and intuitive. For example, you can create a “goodnight” routine with Alexa that dims the lights.
Start by creating your smart lighting ecosystem, installing an array of smart light bulbs, strips, and switches. Next, use the Cync app to connect the lights with your Google or Amazon digital assistant. Then try out the many available voice commands, from “Dim the lights” to “Make my kitchen brighter.” Cync also offers Smart Plugs that can bring freestanding lamps and other electronics into a fully complete smart home suite that’s as extensive as a hard-wired system but far less expensive and hard to install.
So, yes, adaptive, dynamic, colored lighting is very much a part of home design going forward and a big step forward in customization personalization. But at the end of the day, this leap doesn’t have to cost you a great deal of time or money, provided you pick the right products.
