New area card (HA 2025.7) doesn't allow adding entity as control feature

[bieniu]

Currently, the area card allows you to add lights or switches as control features. In my opinion, this is not very useful in most cases. I rarely want to turn all lights/switches on or off in the area.

As a user, I would like to be able to add individual entities, e.g. the main light in the room, which is used most often, and other types of entities, e.g. a fan.

If customize controls is active then I would like to be able to select any entity for which the homeassistant.turn_on/homeassistant.turn_off actions can be used. Not only all lights and all switches.

[rverstappen]

I agree. I like the new Area card (especially the compact option) because of the look and feel but I still prefer the flexibility of the entities in the title/subtitle card. In the attached image I show the common and different features. As an example, I would love to see the status of a TV in an Area and also to be able navigate to control it.

I would also suggest that Lights should be the rightmost device group by default for an Area because those are much more likely to be present in an Area than anything else.

[Mariusthvdb]

what's more with the current state of the controls: I have more than a few toggles secured with a confirmation etc. These now are also included in the current toggle all functionality, which is downright disastrous

as it stands the Area card still is in an experimental stage, and not ready for production imho, because of not being able to set individual includes/excludes.

It looks promising, even though the looks are also a bit underwhelming, especially when lined up with a few tile-cards, because of the lack of styling of the main icon

(mentioning that here explicitly, because I use a yaml hack to set a main entity to the card, and use that for styling modifications ;-) )
I opened a FR in the new Discussion section that is related

[Happy-Cadaver]

I think the all-in-one control is a flawed design. IF I had hit the switch button to see what it does without thinking about it I would have shut off 2 lamps and my HA box in one fell swoop. Not all switches should be toggled from a common dashboard.

[ChristophCaina]

That's basically, how the area card has already worked for years.
I Hope, that it will get more iterations over the upcomming releases - since it finally was recognized as Something that needs to be improved.

I really appreciate the development on the Card - it didn't changed too much in a functional Level, compared to previous Versions.

I think, it was missed to compare the old and new card during the Stream...

[Mariusthvdb]

same goes for sensor entities I would think. My kitchen has a temp sensor for ambient and for fridge... not sure how that would be calculated in the sensor classes.

[piitaya]

For temperature and humidity sensor, you can assign the temperature you want in the area settings.

[Mariusthvdb]

yes, you are right! I forgot about the settings in the Area settings completely.... sorry, I was focussed on the selector in the area card.
apologies.

since you mentioned that, was it considered Not to show any selector, if no sensor entities would be available for an Area

its a bit of a waste of space, and more importantly, somewhat misleading to have the user look for them when the system knows they are not available

[bieniu]

I wonder... if just as we can currently set the main temperature and humidity sensor for an area, we could also set the main light (and/or main switch, main fan, etc.) for that area in the configuration. And then the area card could offer to add a control feature not for all lights but for that main light.

I think this could also be used for voice assistants. The command turn on the light in the living room would only turn on the main light in the living room if the user configured the living room area that way. Currently, turn on the light in the living room will turn on all lights, e.g. the light entity for the TV's ambilight, which is not needed.

[Mariusthvdb]

great idea!
especially for the (live?) camera image that is used for the Area image. Would be great if that could be accomplished.

[bieniu]

I opened a discussion about this idea https://github.com/orgs/home-assistant/discussions/863

[D3v01dZA]

I agree, everything in Home Assistant revolves around the idea of "entities", not "classes". Not much in my setup works when you make all things of a specific type always change at the same time. In fact I'd argue that for anyone who has actually automated their lights this is probably only counter-productive. For example my house works in a way where the lights being "on" in a room is decided at a room level and then which lights are on is decided by an automation (this "on" state is what I actually want to show on the card). If someone wants a specific light to turn on they can toggle that one by themselves and the automation won't interfere. This card prevents nuances like that. Generally speaking I don't mind too much that this is how the card works as its a choice someone could make but I hope that this card isn't a sign that Home Assistant is moving towards "classes" more generally.

[karwosts]

I had a thought like maybe we can tweak to allow add any entity feature to the area card (or any other card that supports features really), and then you could pick the specific entity that feature apply to. However it is not very compact since each additional feature takes a whole row, so not really sure if that would be useful or not.

[pcan08]

Why not a grid system for features like the grid of section for card ? Some code already exists, maybe it could be reused, but that needs to add size config for features.

[pcan08]

To be more specific, here a POC (not in area card but in a kind of enhanced tile card with features of multiple entities i am working on.

Capture.video.du.2025-09-05.09-21-35.mp4

That makes the card more compact

[karwosts]

Looks pretty neat. I kind of fear that this is designing another layer of mini-dashboards all over again inside of a tile card, and I know a lot of thought has gone into the current UX... so I'm a little skeptical if designers want to take that or not. 😅

[pcan08]

Thank you.
For now the only thing I can do is propose something that users would like to have and we'll see. Unfortunately I don't know what direction the designers want to take. And this is a WIP so it's not mature enough yet.
But I'd like to have some core team members feedback, so that I can continue or not.

[rverstappen]

It seems like the Area card could easily be made more generic, keeping the same look and feel but customizable with entries like the title/subtitle card. This is especially true for the compact view. Maybe call it the Group card with the Area card being a special case version. A generic Group card would also allow elimination of the unwieldy vertical stack and lots of conditional cards to group things customizably.

[BBE-FR]

I fully agree with this kind of concept. I have asked for it since a long time here : #19930

I was really happy to see a new area card, thinking it would cover this need, but was finally deceived by its limitations...

[BBE-FR]

To go a step beyond, I think that, while keeping the current look of the area card, it would solve 90% of the issues to be capable to customize the buttons with a level of customisation close to the tile card icon (default state and customization capabilities):

In the same way you can add entities to the heading card, you could add entities to the area card.
Each entity would add a new button (with the same design as current one) with:

• as default behavior the same default behavior of the tile card icon of the associated entity (icon/color/tap action).
• capacity to customize icon/color/tap_action in the same way as the tile card icon (same capability and possibly same interface)

This would allow to quickly design very simple buttons or indicators with the same look and feel as the tile card or area card.

This level of customization would be 100% coherent with Tile and heading cards and would allow to use those buttons to toggle entities, display more info, navigate or launch actions which would probably solve 90 to 99% of the needs.