The increase in computational power and the networking abilities of home appliances are revolutionizing the way we interact with our homes. This trend is growing stronger and opening a number of technological challenges. From the point of view of distributed systems, there is a need to design architectures for enhancing the comfort and safety of the home, which deal with issues of heterogeneity, scalability and openness. By considering the evolution of domotic research and projects, we advocate a role for web services in the domestic network, and propose an infrastructure based on web services. As a case study, we present an implementation for monitoring the health of an elder adult using multiple sensors and clients.