Story and Photos by Dave Bullock
LOS ANGELES – Forget your preconceived notions about factory-built homes. Designed by Ray Kappe and constructed by green builder LivingHomes, the Wired LivingHome is a high-tech domicile made of prefabricated pods. It was assembled on the site in less than three days.
The 4,000-square-foot, $4 million, LEED-certified luxury house is filled with the latest in home automation and green technologies. Take a look at the prefab palace in these photos. Want to visit? The Wired LivingHome is open to the public Thursday through Sunday until Nov. 19. Tour tickets include a one-year subscription to Wired magazine. (Full disclosure: The Wired LivingHome is a Wired marketing project.)
More photos after the jump.
This bedroom is decorated with an working unmanned aerial vehicle for all your remote monitoring needs. Note the digital picture frame in the center; this one and others like it throughout the Wired LivingHome link to a central media server that pushes updates to frames in each room.
Photo: Dave Bullock
What LivingHome is complete without a 7-foot rack of home-automation and entertainment equipment? It's filled with Control 4 home-automation controllers, which are responsible for the operation of every light in the house, the heating and air conditioning and much more.
Photo: Dave Bullock
Control 4 recessed wall interfaces throughout the LivingHome let the homeowner manage all the high-tech gear. These handy little devices, with their simple touch-screen interface, let the owner turn lights on and off, view security cameras and play music anywhere in the home.
Photo: Dave Bullock
If the LivingHome's roof-top solar cells don't put out enough energy to meet your family's power-consumption needs, just throw little Billy on this power-generating bicycle. The pedal-powered generator converts hard work into DC electricity. A battery box stores the juice for when it's needed most, at which point an inverter will convert it to AC.
Photo: Dave Bullock
A scale model of the Wired LivingHome, built out of Lego bricks, sits inside the Wired LivingHome. How very meta.
Photo: Dave Bullock
