The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the history of home automation, by looking at how the automation of private life in homes of the future have been imagined for the past 100 years. The notion of an automated house brings home ideas of efficiency and productivity which are otherwise reserved for working life, putting the human perspective at the fore by implying values expected for the individual or the family. When the architect Le Corbusier in 1923 proposed that a house should be seen as a “machine for living in”, he initiated a modernist view which conflates architecture and technology in an ideal of functionality; it takes machinery in the industrial age as its model but places it in the private sphere of the home. Promotional and instructional material reflect a development of this imaginary into the present day. From the 1930s on, this vision is exhibited at world fairs and home shows, where model homes are not only planned for optimal functionality but are increasingly filled with technology that would facilitate domestic life. From the 1960s, the mechanical home begins to be supplanted with prospects of computerisation, paving the way for an idea of ‘smart’ homes, built on digital, interactive technologies, until needs are anticipated by artificial intelligence. The current prospect of living in a ‘metaverse’ implies a virtual home which brings into question the very nature of physical dwelling.