At the moment I have standalone lamps with Sonoff D1 dimmer and halogen (yes, really) bulbs that can actually be dimmed 0-100%.
It is insane how unreliable the ikea products have been and how terrible the interface is vs philips.
I am moving to Deconz (Phoscon) for full flexibility though..
Your house is massive or your castle is very tiny. Either way, that’s an usual amount of lightbulbs.
I have some bulbs, 4 spot lights, lightstrips around the living room. Lamps around the studio, bedrooms, living room. If you add bias lighting and indirect light by bouncing off the ceiling you add up quite fast.
Granted, I built up this setup over some time, finding the best use for each set of lights I got but I can definitely see how you could get up to 100+ in a larger house.
Even a bathroom easily has 6 or 8 in the ceiling, a few near the mirror etc.
https://www.lutron.com/en-US/products/pages/standalonecontro...
Made for UK wall switches.
Everything is controlled via Homeassistant+Deconz and a Phoscon Zigbee Dongle.
It's even possible to hack the IKEA switches into the danish wall switches.
Still wondering what @t0mas88 is using...
The upcoming Lidl remote is very interesting indeed, because it has 4 buttons which could be wired to a regular 2 button up/down push switch (e.g. Gira 014700) as cheaper friends of hue alternative.
Also 3d printed a holder for a few places that slots into a Gira frame and holds the Philips Hue Tap button. Allows more control of scenes etc, but the color isn't exactly the same.
Friends of Hue (Gira and others) with EnOcean comes close, but you'll typically bridge the switch AC wires, so there is nothing to pull out and manually control things as backup.
And 3d printed a holder for a few rooms that fits the Gira frame and holds a Hue button. Works to control more things (and used it that way in my old house), but the color of Hue isn't exactly the same as the frame.
If they were held in by magnets then I'd call them the perfect switch for the Hue series.
Unfortunately they discontinued them, and on the used market they're often >$100 per switch.
I have all lights (100+) in the house on Zigbee but without changing any wiring. Only non standard is that I replaced all the wall switches with a variant that's electrically "always on" and sends a Zigbee command when pressed (and can be pulled out to access a traditional physical switch as a backup in case of full system failure). They fit the original Siemens outer wall plates that my house was built with so everything looks standard. Returning evening to non-smart in case I want to sell the place is an afternoon of work replacing the switches behind the plastic face plate with their old versions. Those are all in a box in the attic :-)
The benefits of smart lights for comfort are pretty big, auto-on lights by motion detection is great for bathrooms, storage rooms etc. Having the color temperature match outside and time of day is also much better than traditional dimmers. Voice control is useful in some situations (mostly when cooking or carrying kids or groceries). And being able to walk out the front door saying "Alexa, turn off all lights" is a great way to save energy and make things easy.