Bright Lights: Smart Lighting Options for Any Estate

Perhaps no sector of the smart home market shines as brightly as smart lights.

Here are some clever options for introducing intelligent illumination into your home.

Philips Hue

If you’re solely in the market for smart bulbs you’re not going to do better than the industry leader—Philips Hue. Besides letting users control their lights from anywhere in the world, Phillips Huealso offers 16 million colors with which to play. The bulbs can be set to sync with music, television, movies and gaming, shifting shades automatically with the entertainment experience—or users can schedule their lights to run through their own custom loop of colors. The Philips Hue product line also pairs nicely with your other smart home devices—letting you automatically turn on your living room lights as soon as you deactivate your smart lock, for example.

Philips Hue White and Color Starter Kit is available for $282.99

Nanoleaf Aurora

For those looking to play with form as well as function, Nanoleaf Aurora offers an artistic approach to home illumination. Consisting of a series of interlocking, interchangeable and rearrangeable triangular panels—think plastic pizza slices—and offering a palette of 16.7 million colors, Nanoleaf provides design enthusiasts with an infinitely customizable lighting solution. The panels can be set to dedicated colors—or shift shades within a modular section or throughout the entire circuit. The Nanoleaf Auroa app also offers a community of like-minded creators sharing their own color sequences—known as "scenes"—which users can swipe for their own use. Nanoleaf pairs with popular A.I. assistants like Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, allowing you to control the lights with your voice.

An 18-panel Nanoleaf Aurora kit is available for $359.98; A 27-panel Nanoleaf Aurora kit with a Rhythm Module (syncs color sequences with your music) is available for $647.44.

C by GE Sol

If you’re looking for more with less, a smart lamp is a good option—and the C by GE Sol is certainly a smart lamp. Resembling an upturned halo, the Sol is a voice-controlled lamp that can sync with your circadian rhythms, providing different warmths and hues of light to send you to sleep in the evening and wake you up in the morning. And how can Sol provide such voice control? It has Amazon's A.I. assistant Alexa, the power behind the Echo smart home hub, built-in, meaning the Sol can do anything an Echo can—from ordering groceries to offering news updates to playing games.

The C by GE Sol is available for $199.

MiPow Playbulb Garden

Lighting is not a purely internal affair of course. The Playbulb Garden from MiPow are disc-shaped lighting devices that can be planted directly into the ground. Solar-powered and water resistant, the Playbulb Garden offers 16 million colors and five lighting effects (Pulsing, Flashing, Rainbow, Candle, Rainbow Fading) that can be chained across multiple garden pods, bringing a party atmosphere to your peonies. While the Playbulb Garden can be completely controlled via an accompanying app, the pods are clever enough to recognize when it is dark, or light, enough and will automatically switch illumination on and off.

The Playbulb Garden is available for $39 per pod.

holi

Like the lesser works of Huey Lewis, the holi smart lamp asserts that it is, in fact, hip to be square. In addition to its unique design—think backless picture frame—the holi, equipped with 18 high-efficiency LED lights, allows owners to instantly change their home’s decor with hundreds of millions of color combinations, all with the tap of a button on the accompanying holi app. Or if you’d rather let the lighting experts establish the mood, users can pick from one of 50 ambiance settings. The holi does more than just offer infinite lighting design options, however. The smart square will sync with your music to turn any gathering into a dance party, and also includes a sunrise simulator that will help you rise and shine gently—especially if you missed the natural sunrise by dancing the night away.

The holi is available $199 per lamp.