I love themed rooms and, to commemorate the grand opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter this Fall at Universal Studios Hollywood, I decided to decorate a guest bedroom in a Harry Potter theme.

I decided to name the room, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” first of all, because the word chamber is a synonym for bedroom and two, I planned to pack this room full of secrets by using just a touch of magic.

Now, this may take a little bit of imagination so bear with me here.

The first secret is a hidden drawer in a night stand beside the bed. Inside is a wand and a music box. When guests arrive I casually walk over to the drawer, pull out the wand and push the button on the music box which begins to play Hedwig’s Theme, adding a dramatic touch to my next demonstration; turning the light on by magic.

With a flourish of the wand, and in a booming voice, I command the light to turn on with the words, “Lumos Maxima!!!!” To the delight and amazement of my guests, the light magically turns on. They then clamor to try it themselves. Some succeed. Some do not. Either way, it’s all fun.

I found the secret to the magic light with the help of Google and a new Kickstarter project called the Vocca Lite. It turned out that someone took the original Clapper idea and made it voice activated. Brilliant!

But that didn’t completely work for me because the basic version could only be controlled with the pre-programmed command, “Vocca Switch Light“. I wanted to customize the command to make it suit the Harry Potter theme. Well after digging a little deeper, I discovered that the geniuses at Vocca Light also thought of that and developed an app to communicate with the light and record any command you want. Bingo!

And my vision for the Harry Potter experience came to fruition.

More info: Amazon | airbnb.com

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