Brookfield Residential builds a dream home for Alexa

If you live in Northern Virginia, you can take a tour of Brookfield Residential's newest project -- a smart home built to work with Amazon's assistant Alexa.

The Washington, D.C., division of Brookfield Residential -- a land developer and home builder -- built the house in Bristow, Virginia as a showcase for smart home technology. Apparently, the company worked closely with Amazon to make sure Alexa was integrated throughout. Indeed, you can see several of Alexa's flagship devices -- the always-listening Amazon Echo -- in the pictures.

Most of what you can do in the Brookfield smart home is standard fare if you own an Alexa.

• Play music
• Water the lawn
• Turn on the lights
• Lower the shades

Interestingly, Brookfield's home also lets you ask Alexa about your security cam. We haven't seen that feature on Alexa before. You'll also be able to trigger multiple devices to react with a single command -- a la HomeKit's scenes. You can group devices with Alexa normally, but before this Brookfield home you couldn't specifically set up scenes to adjust the thermostat, turn on the lights and raise the blinds when you say, "Alexa, I'm home."

Though it sounds like camera integrations and scenes were developed specifically for Brookfield, I'd certainly like to see that functionality rolled out broadly, especially if it works well in Brookfield's fancy new place. I've contacted Brookfield and Amazon to see if we can expect this innovation to go public, but neither responded immediately. I'll update this post if I hear more.