Athom, the Dutch outfit behind the Homey smart home hub, has just launched something that sounds almost old fashioned for 2026. A physical dial you can turn to control your house.
Homey Portal is a small round controller, either sat on a desk or mounted on a wall, built around a 2.8 inch touchscreen and a stainless steel rotary ring. It is assigned to a specific room or zone in your home, and lets anyone standing in front of it control the lights, music and heating in that zone, along with keeping an eye on energy use. No app required, no phone required, just a tap or a twist.
It is available to pre-order now for an introductory price of 249 euro (pre-order Homey Portal), rising to 299 euro once the first batch sells through. That pricing is the same for Ireland as the rest of the eurozone, and orders are expected to start shipping before the end of 2026, first come first served.
The idea behind it is simple enough. Most smart home control still lives on someone’s phone, which means whoever does not have the app installed is stuck asking someone else to turn the heating up. Homey Portal puts that control back on the wall, closer to how a normal light switch works, just with a screen and a dial attached.
For lights, a tap turns everything in the zone on or off, or pulls up a single light to adjust on its own. The ring sets brightness, and dragging a light around the display changes its colour or warmth. It works with lights already connected through Homey, including Philips Hue and IKEA gear. Music works much the same way, showing album art and the current track from linked systems like Sonos or Denon Heos, with the ring doubling as a volume dial and a tap to skip.
Climate control covers thermostats such as Nest, Tado and Honeywell, showing current and target temperature with the ring used to adjust the setpoint. There is also a live energy dashboard, pulling in data from the Homey Energy Dongle or third party meters like Shelly and HomeWizard, which combined with dynamic pricing is meant to help you spot the cheapest hours to run something power hungry.
Beyond the basics, Homey Portal can be wired into Homey’s automation system, Flow, to show custom prompts. A camera feed and a yes or no question when someone rings the doorbell is the example Athom gives, and it can also show weather and short forecasts. Worth flagging for anyone renting out a place on Airbnb or similar, the standard icons can be stripped back so guests only see shortcuts to the devices they are actually meant to use, with all of that configured through the Homey app rather than on the unit itself.
One thing worth being clear on. Homey Portal is not a hub on its own, it needs to be paired with Homey Cloud, a Homey Pro from 2023 onwards, Homey Pro mini, or a self hosted Homey server. Homey Cloud is free for up to five devices, so anyone with a small setup could feasibly run this without paying anything beyond the hardware itself. Anyone with a bigger smart home will need Homey Premium to go past that.
Athom has been behind Homey since 2014 and became majority owned by LG Electronics in 2024, and the company claims Homey now supports over 70,000 devices from more than 2,000 brands. Whether Homey Portal actually earns its keep on a wall long term is something we will only know once units start landing, but as a concept it is a genuinely different take on smart home control worth keeping an eye on.
