The Smart Home concept is an extensive technological concept which have seen a major resurgence in recent years. They are aimed at automating daily living activities, central monitoring and control of the home, power consumption optimization, greater security, and ensuring a healthier living condition among other things. The capabilities of the Smart Home are further enhanced when combined with the Internet of Things (IoT) and cutting edge technologies such as embedded artificial intelligence. However, the Smart Home design is beset by a number of issues including a lack of universal technical standards and platform fragmentation. This paper is aimed at generating operational guidelines and a design framework for Smart Home architecture. An extensive survey of literature is carried out to investigate the general architecture, existing models and designs of the Smart Home System in other to establish how current models impact on the operations of the smart home. We then highlight the major challenges to the smart home architecture and why these exist. Finally, we attempt to discuss what possible solutions can mitigate identified challenges. A general framework is then proposed for the design of smart homes, which helps overcome identified drawbacks to the Smart Home architecture.