FOCUS 075 Right


This may look like just a beautiful staircase, but whenever someone walks up or down it creates a symphony of sound and colour – just one of the many smart home features in this 18,000ft2


, six-bedroom


private home in London with an indoor swimming pool, gym and car-stacking garage. The lighting and sound effects in the staircase are activated by pressure sensors recessed to the underside of the translucent Corian treads, integrated into the Lutron system for easy control. The home also has an indoor slide with interactive sound and light and a lift with video screens.


Interactive flooring SMC Client Private home


Architect/Interior deisgn KSR Architects & Interior Designers


Structural Engineers Price & Myers


Middle right


Floors provide ample space for being creative with lighting, as Nulty demonstrated at the Hakkasan Terrace in Abu Dhabi, where the team used linear profiles across the floor, pathways, and underneath cabanas to create a visual effect, but also to highlight circulation routes. The exterior terrace of the restaurant, in the grounds of the Emirates Palace hotel, features soft lines of white light, embedded into the stone floor surfaces to form a playful visual effect across the terrace, steps, and pathways, creating an elegant ambiance as well as improving wayfinding.


Lighting design Nulty Client Hakkasan


Architect and project manager Woods Bagot


Interior designer Gilles & Boissier


Fit-out Decovision LLC


Achievement Award from Cedia, the association for smart home professionals that he helped launch in Europe back in 1994. After reading architecture at Te Bartlett, Moore was drawn into the world of new technology, spending ten years working in high-end AV before launching his own smart home company, SMC, in 1993 – the same year the World Wide Web became public. Before most people even had email, let alone broadband, he was laying the groundwork for today’s ultra-connected smart homes. Moore notes that flooring offers a wide range of high- tech possibilities, assisted by the fact that it presents a wide and uninterrupted area, unlike walls and ceilings that have multiple punctuations for lights, switches and other devices. Possibly the most exciting prospect is the use of


Bottom right Electric car charging with no trailing cables and no need to plug in is the next innovation on the horizon. Siemens and Mahle are collaborating in the field of inductive charging of electric vehicles, bringing to the market charging pads set into the floor that can repower an electric car with minimal effort. The technology could go further still, as scientists are experimenting with embedding charging strips into roads, so drivers will never need to charge.


flooring for generating electricity – a bill-payer’s dream that is already becoming a reality on a small scale. ‘Sprung floors have been used in ballrooms and exercise spaces for over a century, and designers have experimented with the harvesting of power using these movements for a while,’ he says. Companies including Pavegen and Energy Floors are already creating floors in high-traffic areas such as airports, museums and shopping centres, where everyday footfall can power displays and games – it’s a long way from powering an office from people strolling to the water cooler, but it’s a step in the right direction.


While these developments are still at a relatively early stage, Moore notes: ‘Tere are, however, some more practical power solutions coming soon to a floor near you. Various companies, including Tesla, power giant Siemens, and others, are launching underfloor and in-floor charging solutions for electric vehicles, so you don’t need to plug in. It’s similar technology to wireless mobile phone chargers but on a much larger scale.’


Flooring is also wide open to the possibility of integrating other systems, from lighting to video screens to smart pads that Moore says ‘allow visitors to play games, solve puzzles or otherwise engage with the environment,


ALEX JEFFRIES


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