Home Assistant lets you take full creative control over your smart home dashboards. Whether you’re crafting an interface for a tablet on your wall, a control panel for your living room, or an overview on your phone, the possibilities are endless — and beautiful.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the best practices and design principles for building modern, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing dashboards, room by room and theme by theme.
✅ You are the designer. Add your own flair — use photos of your house, upload a floorplan, reflect the season or your mood, and arrange things exactly how you want. No code necessary for most of it.
🧠 General Design Principles
- Clarity first: Show only what’s relevant. Avoid clutter.
- Consistency: Keep similar elements styled alike — icons, spacing, fonts.
- Touch-friendly: Design for tablets and phones. Make buttons large enough.
- Contextual relevance: Every dashboard should match its purpose — a kitchen dashboard shouldn’t show the front door camera.
🏠 Room-Specific Dashboards
Room dashboards are great for controlling a single space. These are often the ones you’ll pin to a tablet or smart display.
Suggested Layout:
🔼 Top area
- Navigation bar with links to other rooms
- A nice clock + weather widget, like
custom:clock-weather-card
🌡️ Environment
- Show the temperature and humidity for the room
- Use
custom:mushroom-template-cardwith colored icons or mini gauges
🎥 Camera (optional)
- If the room has a camera, show a snapshot or live view
- Use
picture-glanceorfrigate-cardfor smart security cams
🖼️ Background
- Add a seasonal or mood-based image
- Use your own photos or wallpapers
- Set this via
card-modfor each dashboard
🔥 Controls
Climate / Thermostat
- If the room has heating/cooling, show it
- Use
custom:mushroom-climate-cardorsimple-thermostat
Lights
- Stack
mushroom-light-cards vertically - Let users control brightness, color, or just toggle on/off
Scenes & Moods
- Use
custom:mushroom-template-cardwith icons like “Movie”, “Relax”, etc. - Tapping runs a scene
🌍 Full-Home Dashboards
These dashboards give you the big picture: what’s happening across the whole house.
⚡ Energy Dashboard
- Use the built-in Energy dashboard + cards from
apexcharts-card - Show solar production, usage, power flow with
power-wheel-card
🔐 Security Dashboard
- Alarm panel + status of doors, windows, and people
- Camera previews
- Show open/closed sensors using icon-based cards
🌡️ Climate Overview
- One card per room, showing temp/humidity/heating status
- Layout as a grid
👣 Occupancy
- Who is home?
- Which rooms are currently occupied (using PIRs or mmWave sensors)?
- Useful for automations and security
🎨 Add Some Style
Your dashboards should feel like home. Here are ideas to make them yours:
- Use your own floorplan image as a background, and place lights/sensors on top
- Match color schemes to your home’s interior
- Show holiday or weather-based visuals
- Animate icons using state changes
🧩 Recommended HACS Add-ons for Design
| Add-on | Purpose |
|---|---|
Mushroom | Modern UI cards: clean, sleek, responsive |
card-mod | Style tweaks: backgrounds, colors, corner radius |
layout-card | Flexible layouts: grids, columns, responsive spacing |
apexcharts-card | Custom trend graphs (temperature, energy) |
frigate-card | Smart camera viewer, integrates with Frigate |
clock-weather-card | Stylish date/time/weather combo |
decluttering-card | Create reusable card templates for consistency |
🏁 Final Thoughts
Designing your Home Assistant dashboard is one of the most rewarding parts of building your smart home. You’re not limited by rigid templates — everything can be shaped to your taste, your space, and your needs.
Start simple, and grow your dashboards as your smart home evolves. There are no rules here — only possibilities.
Ready to start building? In the next guide, we’ll walk through exactly how to create your first beautiful, personalized dashboard.