Presence sensors belong in the corridor, not the bedroom

A presence sensor can be the most considerate device in a villa or the most irritating, and which of the two it becomes depends almost entirely on the room it is put in. In a corridor it lights your way without asking anything of you; in a bedroom it becomes a nuisance you cannot reason with. This article explains where we put presence sensors, where we will not, and what takes their place in the rooms where a sensor would be the wrong answer.

What a presence sensor is good at

A presence sensor does one job. It turns the lights on when someone arrives and off again when the space is empty, without anyone touching a switch. That is exactly what you want in the parts of a house that people pass through or visit briefly, and so in our designs sensors serve the circulation and utility spaces: the corridors, stairs, landings and lobbies, the WCs, the wardrobes and the rooms that behave like them.

Nobody walking down a corridor is setting a mood. They want enough light to get where they are going, for as long as they are there, and nothing once they have gone. The automatic off is half the value, because a wardrobe or a corridor that switches its own light off is one less thing for anyone to remember, and it spares you a light left burning in an empty space at three in the morning.

Why living rooms and bedrooms stay on scenes

The same device behaves very differently in a living room or a bedroom. Those rooms are lit by intention: you choose one scene for reading, another for a film and another for the last hour before bed. A sensor cannot know any of that. All it knows is whether it can detect someone, and in these rooms that is the wrong question. People sit still through a film, they lie still in bed, and they get up in the night without wanting the room to wake up with them. A room lit by guesses about movement will sooner or later go dark on a quiet audience or come on over someone who is asleep, and once that has happened a few times, the family stops trusting it.

So living rooms and bedrooms are scene-controlled, not motion-controlled, and a presence sensor is never the way we light a bedroom. What those rooms get instead is one control point at the entry, with buttons that each name a scene, and a small secondary point at the bedside where one is genuinely needed. The switches at those points can be the client's own, from the same series as the sockets, so the wall still matches the rest of the house. Across the whole villa, the Welcome, Away and All Off scenes are there by default, so arriving home or leaving it never means a tour of every room.

Two-way control, so nobody crosses a dark space

Circulation spaces get something more than a sensor. Stairs, corridors, landings and lobbies also get two-way control, so the light can be set from either end. The principle behind it is one we hold to throughout the house: nobody should have to cross a dark space to reach a switch, and in a villa the spaces most likely to be crossed in the dark are the ones that connect all the others.

The sensor looks after the ordinary trip along the corridor, but there are moments when you would rather decide for yourself than wait to be noticed, and a staircase is the last place anyone should be feeling along the wall for a switch. With a control at the top and the bottom of the stair, and at each end of the corridor, the light is always within reach, whichever way you happen to be going.

Service rooms get no automation, but they do get WiFi

The maid's and driver's quarters, the service kitchen, the stores, the laundry and the plant rooms get no automation at all, and we leave them out on purpose. A keypad in a laundry or a sensor in a store adds lines to the bill without giving anyone something they will use, and we would rather leave a part off the bill and explain why than add one that nobody needs. The guest WC falls on the other side of that line: it is in scope, but kept minimal, and a WC is precisely the kind of room a presence sensor serves well.

What the service rooms do get is WiFi. Our network design covers every room in the villa, the staff rooms included, with roughly one access point for every 100 m², each wired back to the rack rather than meshed. The people who live and work in those rooms need a dependable connection as much as anyone else in the house, and leaving them off the network to save an access point would be a strange place to economise.

What this means on your bill

On a Homestat bill, every sensor sits in the room it serves, with the rule that placed it written beside it in a sentence you can read. The rooms without sensors are just as deliberate, and the client page explains, room by room, what each one gets and why. If you would like to see those decisions made for your own villa, send us your plans, or read how it works first.