A set of seven suburban homes have gone on the market near London promising a life simplified by computers and the Internet. From the outside, they look like any other home in a leafy London suburb, but inside each house is powered by four ISDN lines, four Compaq PCs, four web cameras, 72 cables and power points.

Life in this house is controlled by the touch of a button on a computer key pad. Heating, lights and gadgets like garden sprinklers can be pre-programmed to switch themselves on or off. In the kitchen,the barcodes on food packets scanned into the computer network let the owners know if they need to send an order, via the Internet of course, to their local supermarket. The four web cameras allow parents to keep an eye on their children in any room in the house, and burglars can expect their pictures, snapped by security cameras, to appear on the Internet within minutes.

There is, however, one room in the house where electronics does not seem to offer any comforts: the toilet. An engineer from Cisco Systems, which installed the computer network in the house said: ``The Japanese have invented an Internet toilet, which weighs what is deposited and tells you if you require more roughage. We didn't think people were ready for that just yet.''

The nerve centre of the house is an inconspicuous ``broom cupboard,'' which houses the computer stations. But all functions can also be controlled from a hand-held web pad from anywhere in the house. For those forced to venture outside this technological haven,instructions can be conveyed over the Internet. So, the happy owner of this œ 500,000 home can switch on the heating and an electric kettle via the Internet, to come back to a warm house with the tea water ready.

The cost of the house is apparently because of its location in Watford, in the desirable commuter-belt around London. The actual costs of wiring the house for the net was just œ 8,000. The house has an additional œ 20,000 of new gadgetry, whose prices will fall over time. Mike Couzens of Cisco Systems says that ``smart homes'' would be just as indispensable as a refrigerator. He said: ``It is going to be like refrigerators. Early use was quite low but then once people got used to refrigerators, they really couldn't do without them.''

While property developers Laing Homes and Cisco Systems have made a splash with their smart homes, there is potential at the other end of the housing market. Social charity, the Rowntree Foundation, and the University of Sussex have together created smart homes at afraction of the price.

Originally designed to help elderly or disabled people, these houses may not be controllable via the Internet, but everything, from opening doors and windows, running a bath to switching on the cooker, can be done at the push of a button on a specially designed portable computer key pad. Owners can programme their system to fit their lifestyle, drawing curtains, making tea and switching off the TV at set times.

The existing Smart Home designed by Sussex University is a single storey house in a complex for elderly people in York. It cost just œ 5,000 to create. Julie Cowans, the project manager, estimates that it would cost as little as œ 1,500 to fit a new or existing house. Cowans said that while the project was started to help older and disabled people, it's clear that everyone will want the technology. She said that many of the automated features, taken for granted in offices and cars, had been adapted for homes and were ``not just for the rich.''