About

haroldathome is the studio practice of Alfie Dennen, working from a 1930s house in Hastings since 2023. The studio is concerned with what happens when the infrastructure for ambient computing becomes rich enough to be material — sensors, voices, paintings, ghosts — and what the residents of such a house might do with the texture of all that attention.

The work spans visualisations of domestic data, custom-trained AI characters, hand-prompted paintings, on-device wake words, and assorted instruments built for an audience of two. Some of it works well enough to share. Some of it failed well enough to share.

A pattern runs through the studio: scaffolding matters more than the model. The presence layer separates body-detection from identity so neither is asked to do the other's job. The agent runs Home Assistant's deterministic intent matcher in front of Claude so the LLM never gets near a request HA can already resolve. The avatar pipeline does its surgery directly on GLB binary, not through a chain of well-meaning conversions. Every piece here is more about what's not being asked of the smart layer than about what is.

Seven of the pieces here are open-source and have a public repository linked at the bottom of the page — every extractable thing the studio has made now lives at alfiedennen/haroldathome. Each repo carries its own REDACTION.md documenting what was scrubbed before release, ships under MIT for the code and CC-BY-NC for the docs, and is structured as patterns you can lift into your own setup rather than data specific to this house. Pieces without a repo are either character (Harold, the voice) or archived (Constellation) — not on the extraction roadmap by design.