Prepare to get envious.

I just read a superb article about a collection of ultra-modern, ultra-stylish apartment/houses in various places across the USA. These aren’t just ‘wannabe’ automated houses, with the odd clunky black remote control to turn on the lights. These are fully fledged tech pads. Wall mounted control panels, running Java software with web access.

Quoted from Wired.com:

Bill Joy’s 10,500-square-foot apartment in New York’s West Village looks more like the home of a die-hard modernist than a tech guru. But there’s more to it than white walls, Barcelona chairs, and urbane chic. “His technical demands were stringent,” says Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier (think Getty Center), who will finish work on the home this fall. “But we found ways to conceal things.”

Cold Storage
Vented cabinets with built-in cooling units hide the room’s embedded controllers, DVD players, and auxiliary inputs.

Home Port
The bedside nook houses a custom multimedia panel with six ports. Joy can plug in earphones to the home’s music system, pipe in tunes from an iPod or laptop, or add new tracks to his 1,600-album inventory.

Hidden Picture
A hi-def 50-inch plasma screen (mounted on a swivel arm) emerges from from behind Wilson Audio speakers.

Lights, XM Radio, the Web - every media source and room in the apartment can be accessed through a wall-mounted touchscreen, coded with custom Java software.

Well, maybe one day. Although I wouldn’t be paying a designer to do it, I think I’d have a crack myself. How hard can it be…..