Get Smart: Dallas Market Center Debuts Smarter Living by Design Showroom

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The Smarter Living by Design Showroom Debuts at the Dallas Market Center

The Dallas design community has another first to boast about: last week The Dallas Market Center opened the first smart home showroom in North America. It is full of life-changing technology that can make anyone’s life a little bit easier – even this tech challenged Lifestylist® can’t wait to incorporate some of it in her Oak Cliff home.

Leslie Carothers moderates panel discussion on Smart Home Living

Smart home technology has been around for decades now. After attending the opening of the Smarter Living by Design Showroom and listening to an esteemed panel of experts talk about what this means for today’s homeowners, I can’t imagine buying a new home without incorporating at least some of these new products and services in it. Panel moderator Leslie Carothers, a marketing expert to the home and design industries, asked the questions we all were curious about, including when to bring in integrator to your project to make sure everything works together.

Leslie shared the results of a study that Coldwell Banker just did with CNet, and they found that homes that incorporated smart home technology sold two times faster than a traditionally built home. That alone is a great reason to invest in this!

Ribbon cutting ceremony for the Smarter Living by Design showroom in the Dallas Market Center

HomeTronics, a Dallas based custom electronics integrator coordinated the development of this showroom. We are so fortunate to have a leader in this field based right here in Dallas. As a Lifestylist, the first thing we noticed when walking through the showroom was the clean, minimal design that was shown throughout the showroom — the days of needing a million remotes, boxes, and wires to make everything work are gone. Now by using a platform like Crestron, your entire home can be programmed and customized to your lifestyle. A complete experience can happen in one click or swipe. No more complicated instructions are needed — the right integration firm can make the entire process seamless. And what was really interesting is that they can make some items that aren’t equipped with smart technology “smart” and work with the other items in your home. Their mission is “ease of use for the end user” — it’s that simple and that complicated at the same time.

Remember when we were lucky to have a connection in a room where the television might go when we bought a home, and the wiring package was the same in every house? A tip that so many of us overlook is that even though many of today’s electronics can work with wifi, to get the best experience being hardwired is preferred. It made sense — it feels like I am continually rebooting my router. That is another reason thinking about all of your needs and wishes before you start building, or when you are touring a home to buy is so important. Plus technology is changing so quickly you want to make sure you are purchasing a home with a system that functions and has the power that your needs will demand.

The Frame TV by Samsung has a changeable frame and optional images that make it look like a piece of art when not in use

Samsung is another partner in the showroom, and it was interesting to hear about how they have been the number one television manufacturer for 14 years. This allows them to design appliances and electronics where a smart home and smart TV speak and work together. They also have Frame TV that I am lusting after. It’s a television that indeed can turn into a work of art as it has a motion detector, so it turns off when no one is around, and an ambient mode that can make your television hide in plain sight.

The Samsung refrigeration acts as an entertainment and communication hub for the family

Chefs like Nikky Phinyawatana and people who love to cook are embracing smart technology in their homesThe kitchen that they have in the showroom shows off their appliance technology as well – a refrigerator that can answer the phone for you or play your favorite Pandora channel, and has a camera in it so you can tell before you get off of your couch if there are any cold bottles of beer in it.

Choose a recipe and know the perfect place and temp to cook it at in your Samsung wall oven

You can preheat your electric oven using your phone when you are waiting in the carpool lane, and look up recipes that tell you where to place what you are making in your oven and for how long for optimum results.

The Dallas Market Center plans on using this space as an incubator and will be open daily to designers and retail buyers and will hold frequent seminars and special events to educate them on this rapidly changing field. Market is only open to the trade, so be sure and ask your builder and designer if they are utilizing this fantastic new tool.

Lifestylist® Suzanne Felber is one of those lucky people who truly loves what she does. By helping consumers discover their “inner-stylist”, Felber has helped thousands of homeowners design their own spaces to reflect their personalities and their lifestyles.
Felber lives in her own Home Idea Factory - a circa 1942 factory that previously housed a printing company in Oak Cliff. She and her brood of rescue cats and dogs have been busy using the building as the perfect place to try out different ideas and products that she is excited to share here.

2 Comments

  1. Leslie Carothers on June 27, 2019 at 5:35 am

    Hi Suzanne: Thank you so much for attending our panel and writing this wonderful post about the launch of the new #SmarterLivingByDesign multi-brand #smarthome wholesale showroom that just opened at Dallas Market Center.

    The credit for this history making smart home showroom collaboration coming together and being leased belongs to Laura Van Zeyl, the Vice President of Lighting Technology and Marketing at Dallas Market Center. She worked on this for years and leased the space.

    It was great to have you there and in years to come, your presence at this panel..and this post…will mark a historic event in our industry’s history.

    Again, thank you.

    • Suzanne S. Felber on June 27, 2019 at 11:03 am

      Thank you for sharing this Leslie – I wish that I could have met her at the opening because I am so impressed with what she has accomplished for the Dallas Market Center. Years ago Tom Corbett of Corbett Lighting was a close friend of mine, and Dallas wasn’t a place that most people considered a lighting destination. In the last few years more and more of my designer friends consider Dallas THE place to come and shop for lighting – that’s a huge accomplishment for all of us -It has really helped put Dallas on the design map and I thank her for that.
      Our readers are the ones that are really benefitting from the changes at Dallas Market Center. It’s now possible for designers to have some of the best resources right here in Dallas that they can visit and share daily and share with their customers. Exciting times are ahead of us!

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