You should give Home Assistant a go! It’s an open-source Home automation platform, managing all your smart home device from a single place. Being open source, it supports almost everything out there, and anything that is not supported out of the box is provided by the community.
Exactly! Dutch dunes are mostly natural: beach sand is blown onto the land and started to pile up, eventually forming dunes. Even in the places where there are buildings facing the sea, they are at least 100(‘s) meters away from the coastline.
The man-made dikes are much more than just a pile of sand. To quote wikipedia:
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