House Control Puts Your Home in the Mac Menu Bar in 3D, With an AI Switch

House Control is a free, open-source app that draws your home as a live 3D model in the Mac's menu bar, in an "island" that drops out of the MacBook notch, and on the iPhone. Lamps light the model the way they light the room. It sits on top of Home Assistant, Philips Hue, Apple Home and Smart Life instead of replacing any of them. And it has an AI Access switch that lets Claude or ChatGPT run your lights and rebuild rooms in the model from photos.

The repo was created October 14, v0.1.0 shipped the same day, v1.0.0 followed on October 15, and it passed 600 GitHub stars within days. Here's what I found reading the README and docs, and what I'd watch.

What it is

Per the README, both apps are "a small native Swift shell (AppKit on the Mac, SwiftUI on the iPhone) around one Three.js web UI." No Electron, no server, no account of its own. The Mac app runs on macOS 13 or newer, Apple silicon or Intel. It's MIT licensed and free with no ads; the README asks for crypto tips if you like it.

Your floor plan is one JSON file at ~/Library/Application Support/HouseControl/plan.json. A visual editor lets you draw rooms, drop in furniture and link each lamp or AC to a real device. Until you connect anything, every device is simulated, so you can try the whole thing first. There are scenes, widgets for the iPhone Home Screen, Lock Screen and Control Center and for the Mac desktop, and Mac-to-iPhone sync on your local network. The two "talk over TLS with a pre-shared key that only the QR code carries," with no server in between.

What it controls, and what it doesn't

This is a lights-and-air-conditioners app. Per the connections docs, it maps Home Assistant light.* entities to lamps, switch.* to lamps on a plug, climate.* to air conditioners, and temperature sensors to a room thermometer. No locks, covers, cameras or alarms. Changes made elsewhere show up "at once" from Home Assistant and Hue, and within 12 seconds from Smart Life.

The connections, with the README's caveats:

Home Assistant: found on your network automatically; you paste a long-lived access token. Works on your LAN alone.
Philips Hue: found on your network; press the button on the bridge.
Apple Home: switched by the iPhone app only, because macOS gives HomeKit to App Store apps only.
Smart Life / Tuya: through Tuya's cloud, using the sign-in Home Assistant's Tuya integration uses, "not through an API Tuya offers to apps." The README warns Tuya can change that interface "at any time. Use it at your own risk."

No Google Home or Alexa yet. Two more limits: rooms are axis-aligned rectangles ("An L-shaped room is two rooms"), and the iPhone app isn't on the App Store; the README says it's on TestFlight for the author's testers.

AI Access, in detail

Start AI Access from the menu bar and you get a private link, with three ways to use it:

Paste it into a chat with your request. It opens a guide written for AI assistants, with an action link for everything it can do.
Add the MCP address as a custom connector in Claude or ChatGPT, or with claude mcp add in Claude Code.
Call the same tools over plain HTTP and JSON from your own agent, with an OpenAPI description.

The tool list in the AI Access docs is short: read the home, set lights, set air conditioners, run a scene, read the floor plan, edit it, replace it, undo the last edit, and render a picture of the model so the assistant can check its own work. Nine tools. ha-mcp, the community Home Assistant server I covered in my comparison with the built-in one, lists 87. This one is small on purpose.

How it's wired: House Control listens on 127.0.0.1 only. To be reachable from ChatGPT's or Claude's servers, the Mac opens a Cloudflare quick tunnel, a random trycloudflare.com address that exists only while AI Access is on. Every address carries a random 128-bit key, and without it every path returns 404. This Mac only skips the tunnel for clients running on the Mac itself, like Claude Code or Cursor. Each start makes a new link, and an old one never works again.

The controls, which take effect even while the link is live:

Lights, climate and scenes off makes the link read-only for devices.
Your 3D home off hides the editing tools.
Auto-stop after 1 hour, 8 hours (the default) or never.

Every request shows up in an Activity feed as it happens, plan edits can be undone, and requests are rate-limited to 240 a minute.

What I'd watch

The link is the password. The docs say it straight: "Anyone who has the link can do what the switches allow until you stop it. Treat it like a house key." The ChatGPT connector setup even uses "No authentication," because the key is in the URL. I'd set auto-stop to 1 hour instead of 8, and use This Mac only whenever the assistant runs on the Mac.

Your assistant's provider sees your floor plan. Per the docs, the provider sees room and device names, their state and the plan. It never sees your Smart Life sign-in or your real device IDs, which are swapped for "linked": true. Devices linked to real hardware can't be removed through the link.

The Home Assistant token is the real key. The AI gets nine tools, but House Control itself holds a long-lived Home Assistant token, saved on the Mac in a file only your user can read (mode 600). That token can do whatever its Home Assistant user can do. I'd create it on a dedicated non-admin user named for the app, so it's easy to revoke and can't reach admin-only actions.

It isn't notarized. The app is signed ad hoc, so macOS blocks it the first time and you allow it under Privacy & Security. What you get instead: every release image is built by GitHub Actions from the tagged commit, with a SHA-256 and a signed build provenance attestation you can check with gh attestation verify. If you're going to give a brand-new app a token to your house, run that check, or build it yourself from source.

Worth an hour?

If you're on a Mac with Home Assistant or Hue and mostly care about lights and climate, I think it's worth an hour with the demo plan before you connect anything real. The 3D view is the hook. The AI design is what I'd point other developers at: one switch, a short tool list, a live log, an undo button, and a link that dies on a timer. That's a better default than most home AI integrations I've read about. Just keep in mind it's a brand-new project with an unofficial Tuya path and no App Store review behind it.