Tony Fadell: the man who wants to take control ofyour home

He helped develop the iPod and iPhone, and now the Nest Labs founder has brought a similar charm to something far less sexy - thermostats and smoke alarms

Tony Fadell's eyes dart around the room and his face wrinkles in cartoonish dismay. He looks, for a second, like he might actually be physically unwell. We are in a library-style room in a private members' club in central London: you or I might consider the decor to be plush, even fancy. But for Fadell, the 46-year-old American founder of Nest Labs home products and one of the original driving forces behind Apple's iPod and iPhone, all he sees are the "warts". The clunky wall unit that controls the air conditioning, the glaring white smoke detector on the ceiling that is completely mismatched with the paint on the walls, the huge television screen that draws your attention to it even, as now, when it is switched off.

These blemishes really do irk Fadell. At the home he designed and built in Tahoe, California, he presses a button and the television rises out of the floor, so that his views of the lake and the Sierra Nevada mountains are not disrupted. Such solutions - and problems - might not be relevant to most people, but Fadell zealously believes there is a place for intelligent, affordable, technology-led design in most homes. Nest, which launched in 2010, has focused on improving - both aesthetically and in function - "unloved, utilitarian" household products: first up was a thermostat and then, unveiled in 2013, a smoke alarm.