In 2013, the house was refurbished and retrofitted with a variety of new and upgraded features, including a building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) array, which altogether halved its carbon emissions and increased its energy efficiency by 50%.

Since its creation, the house has garnered numerous awards, appeared on Tomorrow's World on BBC Television, hosted thousands of visitors, and influenced mainstream construction.

[1][5] The efforts of this design team resulted in the creation of a scale model of a house, which has subsequently been widely exhibited at institutions such as the Science Museum, London as well as profiled in the DK Eyewitness Book Future.

[1][4][6] Damian Bree, Tim Day, Paul Hodgkins, and Nicholas Thompson began designing the INTEGER Millennium House itself in October 1997, a process that proceeded for 10 weeks.

[2] Built on the Building Research Establishment (BRE)'s Innovation Park property in Garston, Watford, the actual construction of the house took 13 weeks before it opened to the public in 1998.

[1][2] Additionally, the south side of the house was built as a three-story glass conservatory designed to provide passive heat gain, although in direct sunlight it could overheat.

[11][13] The Smart Home was officially opened to the public on 2 October 2013 by Dorothy Thornhill, the Mayor of Watford, and Kerry Pollard, a former member of parliament from St Albans who had supported the original INTEGER project in 1998.