Smart Spaces India

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Smart interiors design ideas for your home

A smart house is a home that has been configured to provide maximum comfort and enjoyment using minimal resources. Coupled with security and convenience, a smart house should strike the right balance between form and functionality, interconnecting and controlling multiple elements such as lighting, heating, cooling and security systems.

Moreover, the task of making your home functional is more challenging if the space is less. It can be a true test of creativity of your interior designer.

The beauty of modern smart home technology is that you can choose the features and designs that you want and can afford.  With some forethought and the help of an experienced designer, you can build a system that you can add to over time as your needs and wants change.  Good planning will also let you take advantage of technology improvements as they occur.

Smart House Design Considerations

If you are building a home today, this is the time to plan for the future.  You don’t even have to complete the design right away but you can make it much easier to put in or extend a system in the future.  Consider the following:

What is the exact space at your disposal?

What features do you want now?

What rooms do you want to equip and with what features?

What is your budget?

An experienced designer can help you choose from the menu of smart home options, match your needs and wants to your budget and install high technology to give you a better life.

Here is a list of some of the unique things that you can choose from for a smart house:

Creative Solution

If you can't give up any of your precious closet space but are still pining for a home office, take a cue from this smart home.  The designer has smartly transformed a PAX wardrobe into a home office that can be easily concealed when not in use. 

Innovative Bike Shelf

If you're a biker living in an apartment, you probably know how difficult it is to keep your prized possession safe from harm as well as out of the way. But this nifty bike shelf can surely help in not only keeping your bike safe but also is a smart way of utilizing space creatively. 

Kitchen Cabinets as Concealed Storage

Adding a focal point can be a main design element for your bedroom. By installing ready-made kitchen cabinets to the wall, then adding graphic interest with vinyl decals in various interesting shapes you can conceal the storage that also doubles as an art installation.  The image shows an example of storage with an artwork depicting a fawn and a buck in the forest. 

One Livable Area

You can, perhaps, closely work with your designers to create a floor plan that would open up the kitchen to the adjacent living space. With more ventilation and bright light, this can make your home look much more interesting and spacious.    

Maximum Use

This small apartment in the image does not leave much space for creating a separate bedroom, kitchen and living room. To deal with it, the designer has used his extensive expertise to create a neutral color scheme with warm accessories to provide an open feel, balancing it with the intimacy of a small space. The designer admits that his biggest challenge was to create a space that did not feel like a bedroom, so he smartly placed the bed next to the kitchen, allowing maximum light and views out the windows. 

Thus, if the space available is limited, you may keep the furniture and decor to a minimum while using small light fixtures and furnishings, thus creating a magical space you can call home. 

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Are the amenities you are paying for worth it?

If your apartment had a rooftop bungee-jumping platform with an indoor basket ball court, would you pay extra to live there?  Few may see the value in these features but most would scoff at the idea. Perhaps those are extreme examples, but as apartments become more extravagant, and the developers in their bid to do something different keep adding some no-brainer amenities, it’s the buyers who would have to decide what they really want to pay for.

Where less is good

In contemporary apartments now-a-days, the monthly maintenance fee is conventionally split into two: one part goes to the reserve fund while the rest towards the building’s expenses.

In most apartments these fees range from around Rs 2-3 per square foot, depending on how much it costs to run the building. If your apartment has excessive amenities, then the logic says that you would be paying for them, whether you use them or not.

The most common and probably the most-used features are the gym, rooftop terrace, and a convention room, perhaps. Even as a buyer you can see the value in all three, but anything else can quiet safely be termed ‘unnecessary’. Have a look at the following amenities and make up your own mind.

The ‘so-called’ luxury amenities

Pool: Ok,wouldyou want to swim laps in an Olympic-sized pool, or stay home with your family on a cold winter day?

The worth of a pool depends on whether there are enough professional users in your apartments who are keen on spending their time in an open air pool and do nothing else. Well, then you can’t complain, but who’d really want to do that?   In most cases, an open air pool with the sun beating down just ends up as maintenance overhead nothing else. Add the perennial problem of water-scarcity and what we have is an ideal example of white-elephant in your backyard.    

Games room and movie theatre: A games room might be useful to parents who want to get children out of their hair. But if you don’t have kids, then who has the time to play Ping-Pong, foosball, air hockey, or pinball even on a week-end? Again, who now-a-days has three uninterrupted hours to use an in-house movie theatre? Would you have 10 friends over for a vampire-flick, or would you prefer going to an actual movie theatre to get the real feel of it? Well, it’s for you to decide.

Bowling, basketball, and squash facilities: Luxury apartments which have come up in recent times are quietly turning into graveyard of sports amenities. If the last time you went bowling was for your twelfth birthday, why on earth would you want a lane in your apartment? As for squash courts, they’re always empty, while in some old apartments you may even find a makeshift gym on a former squash court.

Library: I've never quite figured out the purpose of the personal library. Maybe it’s where spouses can get away from each other, but often it’s just a place for lazy residents to store books they don’t want to find a home for. If you like paperback romance novels and back issues of India Today, then fine, but I find the space would be more useful as a guest suite or perhaps an extra space for a party room.

Virtual golf cages: Wow!Who has this kind of time? After you've swam, bowled, played pool, thrown a basketball and whacked some baseballs, how do you have time to do any work and pay off your mortgage?

Make up your mind

Dry cleaning, dog-walking and mint-on-your-pillow turn downs used to be reserved for a select few luxury homes, but now these so-called luxury amenities are entering the mainstream. Ask yourself how much the perks are going to cost you, and then decide if you can take care of your own dry cleaning.

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Smart Spaces: Where less means more

If there ever was a case of opportunity meeting aspiration, then this is it. The Smart Spaces Family Homes, rightly called the ‘NO FRILLS HOMES’ can be yours for less than a lakh. To make these futuristic 1, 2 & 3 BHK apartments on Attibele-Sarjapur (Bangalore) and Vijayanagar (Mysore) your own, just pay 10% up-front and avail a 90% loan from leading financial institutions. 

The concept of Smart Spaces evolved out of our immense expertise in designing living spaces that are intuitive, functional and flamboyant. With an impetus on optimization, Smart Spaces is about utilizing minimal resources to create a perfect mix of pragmatic luxuries and basic necessities. These thoughtfully designed homes have everything you need and nothing that you don’t.    

THINK… Intelligent Design

Located in the tranquil South Bangalore region, each unit in this set of space-optimized apartments is smartly packed with all amenities that our modern, urban lifestyle needs. Alcoves in the corridors created for a more private and personal entry to the apartments are examples many such features that are pragmatic and out-of-box. 

Think…..Zero Frills

Smart Spaces provide basic & most essential amenities that are required in our day-to-day- life. Additional and needless frills like a luxury club-house or a squash-court hardly used by the residents have been sensibly eliminated.  

On the other hand, more essential features like modern shower-heads that conserve water, ample natural lighting to conserve electricity and other such useful features have been included. These features not only add value but also help in conserving precious resources. 

THINK… Pragmatic Functionality

Being Practical is being Smart. With a practical architecture that incorporates simple yet resourceful techniques like ‘Smart Storage’ and “Functional Floor Plan”, functionality takes precedence over form in all our homes. Minimum and efficient use of balcony space minimize the wastage of floor area ratios, while climatologically designed exterior fenestrations result in better light and ventilation.

Grouped and stacked toilets and kitchens with efficient shaft design result in efficient flow of sewage and allow for easy serviceability. Lifts with gearless machines provide low and easy maintenance. The fire rated doors that provide adequate safety have a much longer functional life. 

Think…Vibrant Textures

With so much emphasis on functionality, there has been a cautious effort to keep the structural look and feel intact. The exteriors and interiors vibrant mix of colors and decor are classy and pleasing to your eyes. Environment friendly lead free paints with Tio2 for self cleaning properties not only add to splendor but are also quite durable, bringing down the overall maintenance cost.  

THINK…Serene Locales

Encompassing the real sprit of tranquility & harmony, Smart Spaces homes encourage you to capture and reflect on all the beautiful moments of your life that can otherwise be lost in the hustling noises of bustling urban corners.

Located on Sarjapur Road, just 3 KM from Attibele, these set of versatile homes capture the true essence of elusive serenity while still being walk-able distance to important necessities like shops, schools, hospitals, etc.  

THINK… Eco Sensitivity

Eco sensitive door-shutters made of composite/sandwiched wood panels have been used to give functional durability and safety, while Light RCC structures with economic framing result in optimal use of steel and concrete.

Our immense architectural expertise in futuristic designs is exhibited to the core in this magnificent Seismic Zone II compliant structure, assuring you and your loved ones the protection from natural disasters. Environment friendly lead-free paints, mineral quartz sinks in kitchens with high resistibility to scratches are just a few examples of the kind of attention to detail we have given in designing these spaces. 

At Smart Spaces, everything comes beautifully together to make it a place you would be proud to call ‘home.'