Life in a smart home fitted with Amazon products goes something like this: It’s time to cook dinner, so Dad speaks into the kitchen counter’s Echo Show and asks Alexa to display various lasagna recipes. He slides through them on the screen and picks one. He makes a quick video call to his parents, who also have an Echo Show.

Cooking is done. While dinner bakes, he tells Alexa to inform his son that it’s movie time. Upstairs, Alexa speaks up on the Echo Dot. Downstairs in the open-floor-plan living room, Alexa is lowering the window shades, dimming the lights and turning on the TV equipped with the Fire TV Stick.

It’s the end of the day. Dad’s already in bed and exhausted. There’s no need to get up and make sure all the doors are locked. The Echo Spot on the nightstand takes the command and the Baldwin deadbolts click.

You get the picture. But wait, in case you don’t, you can see it for yourself. Amazon has partnered with Lennar, the largest U.S. homebuilders, to open "Amazon Experience Centers" that showcase Alexa-enabled smart home capabilities in model homes nationwide. And Dallas was the pilot for the partnership that started last summer but was announced on Wednesday.

“We’ve tried to do this twice before and even once had William Shatner in commercials, but the technology wasn’t there like it needed to be and the customer wasn’t either,” said David Grove, Dallas division president for Lennar Homes.

Amazon Smart Home Services started installing its electronics in Lennar homes here in November.

1 / 3An Amazon Ring doorbell has a camera to monitor visitors at an Amazon Experience Center model home built by Lennar in Dallas.(Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer) 2 / 3A WiFi map showing that the entire house is fully covered at an Amazon Experience Centers model home built by Lennar in Dallas, Texas on May 9, 2018. (Nathan Hunsinger/The Dallas Morning News)(Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer) 3 / 3A Racchio sprinkler system that connects to Amazon Experience Center model home built by Lennar in Dallas, Texas on May 9, 2018. (Nathan Hunsinger/The Dallas Morning News)(Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer)

“So far, we’ve activated about 180 homes and there are many others in the finishing stages,” said Jacquese Smith, Dallas manager for Amazon Smart Home Services.

The Amazon Experience Lennar home is located at 7946 Sunflower Lane. It's in a new subdivision called University Place on Coit Road in Far North Dallas where several developers will end up building 700 homes. Lennar's homes here are priced in the $450,000 to $550,000 range and come with commercial grade Wi-Fi ready to handle all the Amazon and other branded devices that a homeowner wants to install.

The Lennar model home is coincidentally within walking distance of the University of Texas at Dallas. It's also in the neighborhood of a local site pitched to Amazon. The experience centers are also in Lennar homes in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington to start with and Amazon said it will be adding more.

Amazon is in the process of looking for a second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, which it says will be home to more than 50,000 employees over a decade. Dallas is one of 20 finalist cities from a list of 238. UT Dallas is a key asset that local officials touted to Amazon as it considers where to locate.

Dallas will be one of Lennar's top five markets this year, said Dallas division president David Grove. It's building homes ranging from $180,000 to $1.6 million in 63 developments across Dallas-Fort Worth. (Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer)

Touch and see

In the Experience center, customers can learn about the Dash buttons for reorders of staples like Tide detergent and Charmin toilet paper and about other internet connected devices. Alexa is omnipresent from Echo devices ready to be programmed to control the sprinkler system, television, lights, thermostat, shades and other things. There's also Fire TV to watch or schedule on-demand home services like gardening.

Think of the Amazon Experience homes as showrooms that are staffed with Amazon employees. While Lennar is selling its smart homes, anyone can come and look and book one-on-one sessions with an Amazon expert to come to their home.

“We can do Wi-Fi assessments and take care of dead and weak spots in existing homes,” said Houston Eby, an Amazon Smart Home product expert.

Smaller inexpensive Dots are good for Alexa commands and acting as home intercoms, Eby said. The larger Echos are for better sound and music.

Amazon picked Lennar because it can showcase its Alexa experience within driving distance of millions of customers, said Nish Lathia, general manager at Amazon Services. Amazon, which thinks of itself as “the everything store,” has picked the everything home builder to showcase its smart home capabilities.

Lennar has the same approach to home building, said David Kaiserman, president of the Florida-based homebuilder. New homes are priced to include the refrigerator, dishwasher and range, garage door opener with two remotes and prewired for things like cable and ceiling fans and now Wi-Fi.

1 / 2An Amazon Echo controls the blinds and television lighting at an Amazon Experience Centers model home.(Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2The Echo Show at an Amazon Experience Centers model home built by Lennar in Dallas, Texas on May 9, 2018. (Nathan Hunsinger/The Dallas Morning News)(Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer)

Booming market

Miami-based Lennar created a big shakeup in the national homebuilding industry last year when it paid $5.7 billion to buy Virginia-based CalAtlantic Group. That created the nation's largest homebuilder, displacing Arlington-based D.R. Horton.

Dallas will be one of Lennar’s top five markets this year. It’s building homes ranging from $180,000 to $1.6 million in 63 developments across Dallas-Fort Worth, Grove said. He expects to close on 2,200 homes this year in the market. About half of those homes are being sold as Wi-Fi certified with Amazon technology.

The first thing customers see on the Amazon Experience model homes is a doorbell produced by Ring, which Amazon recently purchased. Grove notes that the doorbell works without any glitches because the home’s Wi-Fi is commercial grade. There are Wi-Fi boosters in the two-story 3,700-square-foot Dallas home.

Basically that means 250 connections upstairs and 250 downstairs, Eby said. The house is hardwired from a “media enclosure,” which is accessed from door about the size of an old fashioned fuse box in the wall of the laundry room.

Any new connected devices that Amazon comes up with over the next few years will work in a Lennar home, Grove said.

“There are no dead spots,” he said. “It’s engineered to work the same in every room just like your AC and plumbing.”

If you go

The Dallas Amazon Experience Center hours:

Monday, noon to 7 p.m.

Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Sunday, noon to 7 p.m.

Twitter: @MariaHalkias