Interview about Storm Vspec IV Smart Corner Fan, winner of the A' Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Products Design Award 2025
The Storm Smart Corner Fan is a cooling solution designed for compact spaces and smart homes. Its dual axis movement allows for all around spatial coverage. The fan is energy efficient and reduces reliance on air conditioning. It is also smart home enabled, giving users full digital control of its features. With elegantly crafted curves, Storm blends visual sophistication and mechanical innovation, setting a new standard in contemporary and functional fan design.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsFrom the outset, we knew Storm would be an engineering challenge. Although it was not our first corner-mounted fan, it was the first to feature a compact dual-axis mechanism, remote-controlled tilt and sweep movements, all housed in a form factor smaller than anything we had built before. To achieve this, we redesigned the entire gearing assembly to support both a 105-degree or full 360-degree rotation, depending on user preference, while ensuring smooth operation without wobble, drift, or long-term wear. We relied heavily on 3D printing for prototyping, using it to test multiple gear configurations and component placements. Once we met our dimensional and performance targets, we moved into small-batch production for endurance, thermal, and airflow testing before committing to full mass production.
Singapore’s apartment sizes have decreased steadily over the decades, with today’s homes roughly 7% smaller than those in the 1990s. All this while our tropical climate has become significantly hotter. Many modern floorplans feature narrow rooms or irregular layouts that simply cannot accommodate large ceiling fans. These constraints formed the foundation of Storm’s design. We needed a fan that delivered full-room ventilation while occupying a small ceiling footprint.Storm was our natural solution to this insight, a corner fan for the Singapore home: tucked neatly into a corner, occupying zero floor space, yet capable of delivering powerful, room-wide airflow. Its success speaks for itself, with Storm quickly becoming one of our best-selling models, and demand often exceeding our production capacity.
What makes Storm exceptional is its ability to deliver strong airflow across an entire room while operating at just 12W. This makes it significantly more energy-efficient than standing fans of similar blade sizes and even more efficient than many traditional ceiling fans. Its smart-home features enhance this efficiency further. Users can track real-time power consumption, automate with schedules, or activate geo-location triggers to turn the fan off when leaving home. Combined with an EC-Motor that is more efficient than DC-Motors, Storm empowers homeowners to reduce their carbon footprint while enjoying the convenience of modern smart-home living.
Ceiling-mounted fans have historically leaned toward an industrial, function-first aesthetic with sharp angles for easier fabrication, bulky housings for off-the-shelf components, and exposed screws for straightforward installation. We believe function and beauty should co-exist. A fan is a long-term fixture and it should elevate a space, not distract from it. Comfort is delivered not only through airflow, but through the visual harmony of the home environment. With Storm, we designed beyond existing trends. We aimed to shape what future ceiling-mounted designs could look like, intentional forms that conceal the mechanical complexity within.
Integrating the EC-Motor’s control chip into a compact form-factor presented unique engineering challenges. It needed to sit close to the motor for optimal control, but this exposed it to elevated temperatures and electrical noise. These issues were made more severe by Storm’s redesigned, tightly-packaged motor architecture. Several prototypes failed before we isolated the root cause. The solution required improved electronic shielding, redesigned control circuitry, and the use of an aluminium motor casing to enhance thermal dissipation. These refinements ultimately made Storm more reliable and robust than any corner fan we had built before.
Point One was among the first ceiling fan companies in Singapore to introduce smart-enabled fans for both residential and commercial spaces. This early start gave us deep experience integrating with major smart-home ecosystems. Storm builds on that foundation. It is designed to work seamlessly with the most widely adopted platforms as well as popular third-party systems used by homeowners today. Our in-house firmware team ensures consistent performance and reliable connectivity across all supported platforms.
This award reinforces our belief that ventilation solutions in Southeast Asia must be engineered specifically for our climate, not adapted as an afterthought. It motivates us to continue exploring unique ventilation solutions, such as the Storm corner fan, that address the real challenges faced by homeowners here. Most importantly, it strengthens our commitment to engineering excellence and thoughtful design, creating products that meet the needs of homes in this region.
Storm’s snap-on design significantly reduces part count, thereby minimising material usage and waste, while also simplifying final assembly. Its compact and lightweight design further reduces its environmental footprint during manufacturing, packaging and transport. In all areas, we strive to simplify and improve, delivering a high-performing corner fan while minimising its lifecycle carbon footprint in every way possible.
Air-conditioning is widespread in Singapore, yet our research showed a clear preference: homeowners prefer using fans whenever possible, resorting to air-conditioning only when the heat becomes unbearable. Utility costs play a role, but so does comfort and fans can provide that when airflow is properly delivered. When we paired this insight with the fact that households here often face restrictive room layouts that prevent the installation of a ceiling fan of the desired size, or are sometimes unable to install a ceiling fan at all, the opportunity became clear. Storm was designed to fill this gap and provide a high-performance, space-efficient ventilation solution that fits where ceiling fans cannot.
Storm has shown that airflow can be reimagined. We believe the future of ventilation is adaptive to one’s living space and lifestyle. We see a future where ventilation is smart, effortless, and inspiring; where form and function work in harmony. The Storm Smart Corner Fan marks the beginning of a new generation of ventilation solutions designed for homes of the future.
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