How to Create a Comfortable Guest Room with Simple Smart Home Tools

Whether you travel for the holidays, or host friends and family at your home, I think we can all agree on the importance of a comfortable guest room! I'm constantly updating our space to make it more welcoming to our guests, and I've come up with some really fun and easy ideas to add smart home automation tools to our guest suite with the help of my friends at Hive, who are generously sponsoring this post.

The design of our guest room was inspired by the hotels we stayed at during our honeymoon on the Greek islands of Satorini and Mykonos. We wanted to recreate that same uber relaxing vibe for our guests, so we started with dark walls for a cozy feeling, and layered in the colors of the islands with white furniture, blue accessories, and lots of photos.

Over the years, we've continually made small updates to the guest room to make it more comfortable and inviting for our guests, like the addition of the rocking chair in the corner and the soft rug over our not-so-soft builder's grade carpet.

This fall, I've made a few more updates to get us holiday-guest ready, but this time, I've been focusing on how we can use some Hive smart products. I've talked a lot about Hive in past posts, including this one that covers the set up and installation process, as well as some of the awesome ways it's making our lives easier. I won't rehash all those details here - instead I want to get straight to showing you how some of the awesome Hive products are making our guest room smarter and more comfortable for our guests!

When we first set up our Hive family of smart products, Scott placed the Hive Hub - the heart and brain of the system - in the guest room, and connected it to our broadband router. At the time, I gave Scott major props for how well he made the Hub blend in with my decor {that taller white thing behind the flowers is our router, and the shorter one the left is the Hive Hub}.

Ironically, despite having the Hub located right in the guest room, it didn't occur to me at the time to put any other Hive smart products in this room - probably because we weren't expecting any guests around that time. But as I was thinking through ways to make our guest room more inviting for the holidays, Hive suddenly seemed like a very obvious answer. Here's how we've updated the guest room to make it smarter and more comfortable...

I started by replacing the light bulbs in both lamps with Hive Active Light bulbs.

We also have a large, back-lit framed photo that hangs above the guest room bed. It creates an awesome effect when it's on, and provides really nice ambient lighting, but it's not very convenient since it plugs in behind the bed. The simple solution was to plug the back-lit frame into a Hive Active Plug.

Using the Hive app, I set the frame above the bed to a schedule so that it now comes on at dusk and goes off around midnight, but I can easily adjust that schedule to make it go off later if we have guests that prefer an earlier bed time. 

I also set the lamps on a schedule, which works great for adding a bit more light in the house even when we aren't home. But when guests are staying in this room, they will, of course, want to control the lamps themselves. Since our guests won't all have the Hive app on their phones, nor do we want to set every guest up with access to our Hive account, we can let Alexa do the job! 

The Hive eco-system integrates with our Amazon Echo, so by simply placing the Echo on the nightstand, we can give our guests total control of all of the lights in the room, as well as the back-lit frame above the bed via voice commands. 

Not only can our guests tell Alexa to turn the lights on and off, or dim them down to a more comfortable level in the evenings, they can also use Alexa to control the Hive Active Thermostat to get the guest room to the perfect temperature.

Our house has two furnaces - one for the basement, main floor, and second floor {where the guest room is located}, and a separate one for our third floor master suite. Since we have our own furnace in our master bedroom, our guests don't have to sleep at the same temperature that we choose for our room. But in the past, guests would have to go down stairs to the thermostat if they wanted to adjust the heat or air conditioning - not exactly ideal if you're too hot or cold in the middle of the night.

Now, from the comfort of bed, our guests can just tell Alexa if they want to change the temperature at any time of the day or night!

I also added one more Hive smart product in the guest bathroom to make those middle-of-the-night potty trips a bit easier. Our bathroom has a bunch of light switches right by the door, but they are in a totally illogical order. Even after living here nine years, I still flip the wrong switch most of the time and end up turning on the loud bathroom fan when I'm trying to turn on the lights. To avoid this problem for our guests, I added a super slim and discreet Hive Motion Sensor to the half wall between the bathroom counter and tub {with a clear view of the bathroom door}.

  

I programmed this motion sensor to turn on some of the bathroom lights, dimmed down to a soft level, when motion is detected. Now when someone enters the bathroom in the middle of the night, they'll get just enough light to see where they are going without having risking turning on that loud fan and waking anyone else sleeping in the guest room. I love that that Hive Motion Sensor is so small that it just blends right in with the decor. I bet you wouldn't even notice it here if I didn't point it out!

I have a feeling that we will continue coming up with more ways to make our guest room even smarter and more comfortable for our guests as time goes on. The integration with the Amazon Echo makes it so convenient to put control of our Hive eco-system in the hands of our guests without them needing the app, so the possibilities are really endless. If you were a guest, what other home automation perks would make your stay more comfortable? Share your ideas with me in the comments below!

If you're ready to make your house into a smart home ecosystem with Hive smart products, read more tips and ideas in this post, and then use this link and code HIVEANGELA10 to save 10% on your Hive plan at checkout.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Hive. The opinions and text are all mine. Comments submitted may be displayed on other websites owned by the sponsoring brand.