Locations Company24 June 20261 min read
SmartLiving opens its first experience store in Hamburg
A shop you cannot buy anything in - because the point is to live in it for an hour first.
Smart home products are almost impossible to judge on a shelf. A lock is a box until a door closes behind you. A presence sensor is a plastic wedge until the light stays on over your book. So the store we opened this month on Hamburg's Neuer Wall does not have shelves in the usual sense.
It has four rooms: a hallway, a living room, a utility space and a small garden under glass. Everything in them is installed and running as a household would run it, on the same controller, with the automations a real family would write. Visitors are handed a phone that works and left alone in the rooms.
Staff are there to answer questions and, more usefully, to break things on request - pull the internet cable and show what still works, trigger a leak, let a delivery arrive at the door. The demonstrations people ask for most are the failure cases, which tells us something about what buyers actually worry about.
Ordering happens online, as before. The store's job is the hour before that decision. It is open Tuesday to Saturday, and the workshops on retrofitting rented flats are free and, so far, fully booked.