12@ELDEN Launch Party

Thurs, Dec 4th
6-8pm
In conjunction with the bettershelter GREEN AWARDS.
We have had a LOT of submissions for Green Awards, party is going to be great!

$5 Burger Lunch At Generic Youth Tomorrow!

$5 gets you a burger, chips and a soda at Generic Youth!
Tomorrow, 11am-1pm!
YUM.

Small Is The New Big

"The average American home grew from 1,700 square feet in 1970 to over 2,400 square feet in 2004. The typical size of a family home in European Union nations is currently 970 square feet"
I pulled those statistics from current issue of Metropolitan Home.
As natural resources grow more scarce, it is just going to take more to sustain the lifestyle Americans have grown accustomed to.
Americans equate BIG with good/better. You can see in the case of cars and homes, that logic does not neccesarily work. Bigger means more gas, more upkeep, more resources to cool and heat, the list goes on and on. Europeans figured that out a while ago, duh.
Fortunately, we are doing something about that....homes that are smaller, use less resources and are great.
bettershelter says: SMALL IS THE NEW BIG!

1.7 Ocean In DAMSEL Magazine

Megan Koehn, one of the members of our 1.7 Ocean community is profiled in the June issue of DAMSEL Magazine (full disclosure: I am interior design editor for DAMSEL Magazine and profiled Megan for article). It looks great, thank you Megan for sharing! You can pick up DAMSEL Magazine at better surf shops in Orange County. And thanks to Stephanie Lauren for the photos, she did an awesome job.
bettershelter says: READ IT!

12@ELDEN Update

The latest from 12@ELDEN:
Forms to pour concrete driveway, fencing along perimeter and custom upper kitchen shelving made from butcher block countertop material.
bettershelter says: JAM IT!

Another Reason To Be On Westside

Now, if you lived at 1.7 Ocean, you could just ride your bicycle to this sale.
Another win for the Westside!
bettershelter says: DO IT!

Another Positive Article On Housing

Wow, 2 positive articles in one week, knock me over with a feather.
The LA Times notes in their article "The Muted Market" that there is activity out there in housing market, despite the naysayers.

Says the Times: "Those who can stomach the risk of some short-term equity loss on a home they expect to keep for several years and eventually see appreciate are inching their way back to the market, economists and agents say."
The Times goes on to say: "And then there are the communities that rarely feel pain, such as Beverly Hills, Indian Wells, Pacific Palisades and Newport Beach, where prices have continued to climb."
My feelings exactly! If you see something you like, you grab it. You can thank me later.

12@ELDEN News

French doors! Dutch doors! All the doors have been installed at 12@ELDEN, we took care in choosing the doors. Both the dutch and french doors do a great job of bringing the outdoors in and vice-versa. And who doesn't love a dutch door??

The New York Times Agrees

A recent New York Times article about growing fruit trees in your back yard struck a chord with us.
Says the NY Times: "The backyard orchard makes sense, given the growing popularity of the local-food movement. Nothing is more local than the backyard, after all, and home orcharding, as the practice is sometimes called, guarantees freshness and cuts the energy costs for transportation to nil. Anxieties about food safety — sparked by events like last year’s E. coli outbreak in spinach — may also be contributing to the trend."
Our thoughts exactly.

12@ELDEN Site Plan

This is a first peek at the site plan for 12@ELDEN. We will be uploading a color version of this later on and I know it is hard to read (click on site plan, it will open up larger).....BUT when you are at the actual site looking at a bunch of construction debris and then you look at this to see how the open space is marked and what each home gets as private space and then you load in all the awesome landscaping with the community gardens, etc.....it starts to get exciting!