Samsung and Ashley Furniture want to make it easier to buy into the smart home

Explaining the benefits of the smart home isn’t always easy — it’s more of an “if you know, you know” deal. But that “aha” moment — when someone finally gets what’s so great about home automation — often comes when they see it in action. At least, that’s the theory Samsung is testing with its new partnership with Ashley Furniture.

According to a press release from Samsung, The Connected Home Experience powered by SmartThings is launching at Ashley Furniture’s flagship store in Brentwood, Tennessee, this week. It aims to show how furniture and smart tech can work together to create a more comfortable, convenient, and fun home.

The showroom will have several vignettes set up that shoppers can interact with using a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE Plus running the SmartThings app. This will let them control the devices, including smart lights, plugs, shades, and more to see how a Movie Night or Game Day scene might work in the den or living room or how morning and evening routines can spruce up a bedroom.

It makes a lot of sense to demonstrate how smart home tech works in its natural environment. Ikea is one of the few stores that has attempted to do this, occasionally highlighting smart features in its stores’ similar vignettes of rooms in your home. But its stores show only Ikea products.

The Ashley Furniture showroom will feature over 200 products from dozens of different brands, all of which are compatible with Samsung’s SmartThings smart home platform. These include Philips Hue lighting, Nanoleaf lighting, Eve roller shades, Kasa smart home products, and Aqara curtain drivers.

The showroom also features Samsung gear, including Samsung TVs, the Frame TV that looks like a piece of art, and the Music Frame, all of which now include built-in SmartThings hubs for connecting devices and making it possible to set up automations, scenes, and routines.

The TVs are also Matter controllers, allowing you to connect any Matter-compatible device to your smart home, not just the ones shown in the store. Matter is a new standard promoting interoperability in the smart home.

The Connected Home Experience is only in the Brentwood store for now, but Samsung has launched a “new immersive connected home shopping experience” on Samsung.com. There, a SmartThings Interactive Home shows different rooms in a home and demonstrates how devices can interact to help people understand the benefits of connected devices.