It’s 6:30 a.m. and outside your window a garbage truck is trying to drown out the dawn chorus.

Bleary eyed, you slide out from the duvet and gaze reluctantly in the gilt-framed mirror on the dressing table. You don’t like what you see, so you pick up a small black box and click its button.

Instantly, red laser light plays across the table’s surface, marking out the letters of a computer keyboard. You tap the enter button and – as the mirror fades into a television screen – your face merges into the more aesthetically pleasing features of a newsreader. Another tap of the virtual keyboard and a computer menu pops up, putting you in control of the entire house. Feeling more awake, you turn on the central heating, open the living room shutters, flick on the light on the landing, switch on the shower downstairs, and wake up your teenage son by diverting some Bach to his bedroom stereo.

Welcome – not to the house of the future, but to the house of the present. For according to the software giant Microsoft, every piece of techno logical gadgetry installed in its west London show home is available to those in search of the ultimate in luxury.

“Lots of people are doing homes of the future, but this is about what we have today,” said Cynthia Crossley, head of Microsoft Windows in Britain.

The brain of Microsoft’s digital home is in the living room, under the huge plasma screen television. Resembling a large DVD player, it is the $1,900 Elonex media center.

It can record up to 100 hours of TV on its internal hard drive and can freeze and rewind live satellite or cable television. What sets is apart from other personal video recorders is that it also stores a family’s music and video collection, accesses the Internet, and controls lighting, burglar alarms, central heating, shutters, and curtains throughout the home. It also works as an ordinary PC.

Every room in the digital home has a gimmick, although they are often hard to spot. The conventional-looking family photo in the hallway, for instance, is actually a digital image – one of several hundred stored within the $760 Pacific Digital frame that the owner can change with a remote control. The images can even be changed via e-mail, which means families can display their holiday photos while they are waiting for the flight home.

The $4,750 Philips bespoke bedroom mirror doubles as a computer screen and television. Internet shopping can be done in the kitchen by scribbling on a tablet PC equipped with handwriting recognition software, while in all the bedrooms, Philips Streamium wireless media boxes plugged into hi-fis can play music stored downstairs on the living room computer.

In the study, files on the family computer are protected by a fingerprint scanner.

Perhaps the cleverest gadget in the house is the $228 battery-operated i-Tech virtual keyboard. Around the size of a small flashlight, it uses a laser to project a keyboard onto a work surface and infrared sensors to work out what is being typed. The device is connected to a computer or cellular phone using Bluetooth radio signals.

One of the most common objections to digital homes is the amount of wiring needed. But according to Paul Randle, the project manager of Windows, most of the gadgets can now be connected wirelessly. He also believes that the days when hi-tech homes were owned exclusively by single 30-something men are gone.

“We are trying to prove that this is not complicated – and that it can fit seamlessly into people’s lives now,” he said. “It is becoming more and more family-orientated and less and less male-dominated.”