The “Smart Work Home” is a living and working space Raymond Hou and his wife, Yuzu (Song Zhiyou), built by remodeling a 20-year-old secondhand apartment in Taipei. It is their home, the office for their company of one, and one of the most popular series on Raymond’s YouTube channel. For Raymond, the project was both a home renovation lasting several years and a physical embodiment of his idea of integrating work and life.
Origins and Timeline
Raymond bought the apartment, with an interior area of about 23 ping (roughly 76 square meters), in 2021. During the transition, he and Yuzu used a small living room of about 3 ping (10 square meters) in Keelung as a temporary studio. They moved into the remodeled home on August 15, 2022. They did not hand the project over entirely to a design company: Raymond took on both design and general-contractor roles. After buying the apartment, he spent about a year studying interior design and smart-home systems. He gathered examples in Eagle, tracked renovation progress and room dimensions in Notion, and brought a tape measure to stores and friends’ homes to check the width, length, and height of furniture. After moving in, he continued to make adjustments himself. For example, to reduce the echo in the open space for filming, recording, and livestreaming, he skipped paint and exposed concrete, installing Felmenon acoustic panels as a DIY TV wall. 1 The smart devices began with one Aqara wall switch in 2022 and gradually expanded to cover the whole home.
Spatial Design Principles
The layout deliberately departs from conventional templates. Raymond and Yuzu removed three walls and rejected the common practice of dividing a space of just over 20 ping into multiple rooms. Instead, they created one primary bedroom, an open multi-purpose room, and a kitchen. Features include only one bathroom, no separate guest bedroom, an open kitchen, no ceiling in the living room, and no physical light switches on the walls. The guiding principles are “prioritize frequent scenarios over infrequent ones” and “no limits within constraints”: place daily work and living scenarios in the best locations, while letting the multi-purpose room serve as a guest room when needed.
Raymond describes renovation as a form of personal discipline, a continuing struggle between desire and reality, and between individual ideals and family needs. He argues that there is no perfect design that gets everything right from the start. Good design should keep adapting to people’s lives after they move in, rather than becoming fixed at completion. This reflects a design theory he cites: goals often emerge gradually through action, rather than being clear from the beginning.
Technical Architecture
The smart system centers on the Aqara ecosystem, connected through Matter. It also integrates lighting from Philips Hue and Yeelight, as well as devices such as a Hitachi air conditioner, KEF audio, HomePod, Apple TV, and whole-home music playback. The control system began with Apple HomeKit and later moved to the open-source Home Assistant, deployed in a virtual machine on the household Synology NAS. Automation includes contextual arrival and departure detection, with door sensors, Wi-Fi, and mmWave presence detection as redundant signals; adaptive lighting that adjusts color temperature according to the sun’s position; and scene controls for rooms such as the kitchen and bathroom. The system is not set-and-forget: Home Assistant versions once fell behind and accumulated technical debt. A major upgrade and automation rebuild were completed in early 2026, after which AI was also introduced to help with maintenance.
Content Impact
At first, Smart Work Home was a personal record from a time when Raymond’s channel had fewer than 1,000 subscribers and few vendor partnerships. In October 2023, a home tour video of the fully smart home surpassed one million views in a week and was shared by news media. It became a turning point in the channel’s growth and affirmed Raymond’s insight that “recording your own life is the best content.” In February 2024, he was interviewed by the interior-design media outlet “i Design Circle | Beautiful Home” for a feature titled “A Work-From-Home Residence Created With Smart Systems.” It introduced the owner-designed, owner-managed project, emphasizing the absence of physical switches and rituals of daily life. Raymond also hosted member meetups at the home, extending it into a place for community connection.
The series means more to Raymond than traffic. In a post, he said that when he had not yet established himself, a smart-home company in Taichung proactively shared renovation knowledge and equipment advice. When they met again several years later, the company had grown from a small shop into a large experience center, and many of its customers had learned about smart homes from his videos. Raymond therefore announced in early 2026 that he would revive the smart-home series and regularly tour more smart homes, rental homes, and workspaces. 2
Position in Raymond’s Broader Story
Smart Work Home is a concrete realization of Raymond’s idea of integrating work and life. Rather than separating work and life into a balance, he wants the home itself to support focused output and a good life. Automation is meant to remove repetitive chores and restore control over time, aligning with his core belief as a Super Individual (Super Individual). The project also extends Raymond’s familiar methodology—from systematizing information with tools and turning tacit experience into shareable content—from digital work to physical space. It has become one of the most recognizable content lines in his personal brand.
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Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “DIY TV Wall Renovation: Replacing Paint With Recording-Studio Acoustic Panels to Reduce Echo—A Renovation Diary,” public Facebook post, 2022-09-07. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “The Smart Home Series Is Finally Returning After Years,” public Facebook post, 2026-02-01. View original ↩