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Special Report

Showing theWay
The home of the future provides peace of mind for its owners in one down-to-earth package.

Peace of mind—it’s the feeling homeowners get from knowing they are safe, secure and healthy; the feeling they get in knowing all their needs are met.

That sense of comfort is what every homebuilder, designer and decorator aims to offer his or her clients. But in an ever-changing world, it’s more than a challenge to stay abreast of the constantly advancing marketplace . . . that is, unless you visited the International Builders’ Show (IBS) in Orlando, FL, January 11 to 14.

For the last four years at the IBS, the NextGen Demonstration Home, produced by iShow, has become the showcase of the building and interiors industries’ best offerings and best practices in home design, automation, green building techniques, energy efficiency and storm resistant construction. The theme for the 2006 NextGen Demonstration Home was Peace of Mind.

The 2,500 square-foot model home was constructed at the International Builders’ Show by custom homebuilder BrownStone Builders & Associates and was open for tours. This year, Vinylbilt Shutter Systems, Suwanee, GA, was the exclusive interior window coverings sponsor supplying interior shutters for the home offering function, beauty and safety—an ideal fit with the home’s theme.
Also for the first time this year, the NextGen demonstration home will be a model home for the first NextGen Certified™ planned community, Porte de la Mer, to be built near Tampa Bay, FL. The community, also built by BrownStone Builders, will provide inspired visitors with the opportunity to purchase their own Peace of Mind home, complete with all the features and technologies showcased at IBS.

HOME TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE NOW
The Peace of Mind home addressed many of today’s hot issues such as green building, energy efficiency and today’s changing lifestyle needs.

The home brought attention to new technologies such as electronic faucets and tankless water heaters—providing homeowners with the peace of mind that comes from knowing energy bills will be lowered. The home also addressed the growing turn toward green building and healthy homes including innovations such as no-VOC paint and natural organic ornamental plants and turf.

Some of the features included in the home were:
• More than 15 technologies approved by PATH (Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing)

• A DuPont™ StormRoom™ with Kevlar, a residential in-home storm shelter, to give people a place to hide during deadly storms

• The Icynene Insulation System®, which insulates and air seals in one step, helping homeowners save up to 50 percent on their energy bill every month

• Corrosion resistant plumbing and a unique residential fire protection system from REHAU

• Wireless technology by Z-Wave Alliance that allows homeowners to manage their homes from anywhere in the world

• The Connect Io™ Intelligent Oven® that can be controlled from any computer or phone.

TODAY’S LIFESTYLE
An important aspect of the NextGen home is that the focus isn’t on presenting technology just for the “Wow” factor, it’s about using technology to enhance the way people really live. With all its efficiencies and capabilities, the home appeared no different from any other.

Far from a space-age concept creation, the home is very much down-to-earth, showcasing technologies that are not only available, but often very affordable for today’s homeowners.

With today’s constantly on-the-go lifestyles, creating peace of mind is about offering homebuyers constant access to their home, no matter where they may be. For example, there’s the comfort busy homeowners feel in knowing they can call home between meetings and use a phone to access the oven—ensuring that dinner is ready exactly when it needs to be.

Then there’s the peace that vacationing homeowners will feel knowing that, thanks to new wireless technology, they can monitor and manage almost everything in their homes, including lighting and security systems, from anywhere in the world.

In catering to the needs of today’s busy homeowners, however, this year’s demonstration home is also careful to include technology that takes care of itself, like an HVAC system that advises homeowners when it’s time for regular maintenance and filter changes.

The heart of the home is the Media Center PC with Lifeware™, which provides the home control and even offers whole house audio and video distribution features and light control to deliver your content with the right lighting scene anywhere in the home on-demand.

FROM THE GROUND UP
The Peace of Mind Demonstration Home was built to the Institute for Business & Home Safety’s (IBHS) Fortified . . . for safer living® program, designed to raise national awareness of the need to build more disaster-resistant homes.

Whether they result in wildfires, flooding, hurricanes or high winds and tornadoes, natural disasters provide a very real threat to homeowners no matter where they live. But what if a home could be built to withstand many of these threats? The 2006 Peace of Mind home answered this question by gathering the best in today’s construction practices and storm resistant products and placing them all under one—very secure— roof.

Among the storm-resistant features in the 2006 NextGen home were exterior hurricane protection panels and shutters for windows, hurricane-rated windows and doors, a power generator that starts up automatically within 30 seconds following an outage and tests itself weekly, a residential sprinkler system integrated with the home’s cold water line, high performance structural wall sheathing that reduces or eliminates altogether the need for wall uplift hardware, fire resistant joists, and storm resistant garage doors— all topped off with a stone coated, steel roofing system.

If all this isn’t enough, the Peace of Mind home also features the only in-home storm shelter reinforced with a material five times stronger than steel, designed to protect a family from winds equivalent to those seen in F5 tornados and Category 5 hurricanes.

TRAVELING DEMONSTRATION
Draperies & Window Coverings magazine is proud to join iShow as a media sponsor for this year’s NextGen Demonstration Home. A Bellevue, WA-based company, iShow, and its NextGen Division, is the producer of the NextGen series of demonstration homes that are featured at the Consumer Electronics Show, the International Builders’ Show and other major trade shows.

It also produces the Online NextGen Broadcast Network and iShow’s Internet Broadcast Group provides online marketing communications and Internet broadcast solutions for the home category. It also is working closely with Brownstone Builders to develop the first NextGen Rated residential community.