This paper introduces the design of the AutoHome service oriented framework to simplify the development and runtime adaptive support of autonomic pervasive applications. To this end, we describe our novel open infrastructure for building and executing home applications. This includes the amalgamation of the two computing areas of Autonomics and Service Orientation, to produce a Component-based platform providing facilities including monitoring, touchpoints and other common autonomic services. This infrastructure uniquely blends the advantages of distributed autonomic control with global conflict management in a management hierarchy. We discuss this platform in terms of pervasive home systems and show how one would develop such a system for two examples of automated home applications: intruder detection and medical support respectively. Both applications were built within our framework and evaluated showing that the use of the framework introduces minimal overheads but provides many benefits. We then conclude by highlighting the contributions of AutoHome and a discussion about the lessons learned, limitations and future research directions.