SIP has demonstrated its effectiveness in enabling distributed entities to exchange any media using various interaction modes. In doing so, this protocol is showing great promise to support such extended forms of telecommunication services. This paper reports on the use of SIP as a communication middleware to support home automation applications that consist of heterogeneous, distributed entities. We describe how SIP fulfills the requirements of home automation; we present the resulting architecture of a home automation system; and, we validate our approach with various scenarios.