Hauser – a room-first Home Assistant frontend for the rest of the household
Before the actual project, one quick thing.
I posted Hauser on Reddit first and basically the whole discussion immediately became about AI instead of Hauser. I don’t really want to do that again here.
Hauser is developed with substantial AI assistance. If that’s already a dealbreaker for you, fair enough, this probably isn’t for you.
For everyone else:
Why I built this
I originally built Hauser just for myself.
I love Home Assistant, but over the years my dashboards always ended up becoming little control centers. Lots of information, lots of entities, lots of things I understand because I built them.
My wife doesn’t care about any of that. Neither do guests. They want to turn the lights on, see what’s happening in a room or quickly do the obvious thing without first understanding how my smart home works.
So I started building a different interface.
The basic idea is pretty simple:
Home Assistant is the interface for the person running the smart home.
Hauser is the interface for the people living in it.
Instead of starting with entities and cards, Hauser starts with rooms.
You open the living room and it should feel like the living room. The important stuff is right there, less important stuff gets out of the way and technical details stay hidden unless you actually need them.
I also wanted something I’d actually like having permanently open on a wall panel or iPad instead of a dashboard that constantly reminds you that you’re looking at home automation software.
And that was basically it. This wasn’t supposed to become a public project.
Then some friends saw it, liked the idea and asked if I could make versions for their homes too. I did that a few times and eventually figured maybe the basic idea wasn’t quite as specific to my own house as I thought.
So I pulled the reusable parts out, made it configurable and put it on GitHub.
What Hauser actually is
Hauser is its own self-hosted frontend sitting on top of Home Assistant.
Home Assistant is still doing the actual work underneath. Automations, entities, devices etc. stay where they are.
Hauser is mostly about presenting that stuff differently.
Rooms are the main navigation. Lights and climate are directly accessible. There are separate layouts for wall panels and phones, plus things like energy, calendar, shopping, reminders, notes, media controls and optional Jellyfin integration.
But I’m deliberately not trying to expose everything Home Assistant can possibly do.
If something mostly matters while I’m configuring or debugging the house, I’m perfectly happy opening Home Assistant for it.
Why not just Lovelace?
I did that. Several times 
And I’m sure you can get pretty close to this with enough custom cards, themes, templates and CSS.
For me I eventually reached the point where I was spending more time working around the dashboard model than with it.
Building the interface I actually wanted became easier and, frankly, more fun.
So Hauser isn’t a Lovelace theme or card collection. It’s a separate frontend talking to Home Assistant.
Current state
It’s a beta and still very much a hobby project I build because I use it myself.
There is now a Home Assistant App installation path as well as Docker/Compose, and the setup wizard discovers your Areas and entities and lets you choose what should actually show up in Hauser.
It works on my own real HAOS installation. What I obviously haven’t tested is every weird and wonderful Home Assistant setup out there.
The main thing I’m missing right now is simply somebody unrelated to me installing it in a completely different home and telling me where it breaks or where the setup makes no sense.
So if the idea sounds interesting, that’s mainly why I’m posting it here.
Try it. Break it. Tell me what feels stupid. Open an issue. Steal ideas from it. Contribute something. Whatever
If nobody else needs it, that’s also fine. I’ll still be using it.