Urbandigs.com is a real estate strategy site that offers a “Buyers Tips and Tricks” area. Check out the advice they give about what to focus on when investing in a property:

The four permanent features that all buyers should focus on putting their money towards when deciding which product of the group to bid on continue to be:

a) views b) location c) natural sunlight d) raw space

...as these property features generally do not change! The only item that can be changed is natural sunlight and views if you happen to buy a property with a view of a lot that may ultimately be developed; and therefore eliminating or altering your view and natural sunlight. Other than that one risk, your pretty safe. These are the features I focus on when I do consulting for my buyer clients.

Focus on the permanent features. It’s good advice in real estate and in business too. In fact, it sounds a lot like business advice we’ve talked about here: Focus on what won’t change.

When you focus on permanent features, you focus on the things that truly matter over time. Things that won’t go out of style.

That’s why we prioritize on factors like simplicity, speed, and fair prices. People are always going to want these things. It’s why Japanese auto makers focus on reliability, affordability, and practicality. It’s why Amazon obsesses about customer service. It’s why Apple always offers friendly design. It’s why Zingerman’s only sells high quality ingredients.

These things are all constants. People wanted them yesterday, they want them today, and they’re going to want them tomorrow.

Don’t chase the latest technology, fad, trend, or competition. All of these are transitory. You can’t control them and they are likely to change over the next 5 years anyway. Emphasize the temporary and you risk getting stuck selling dial-up in a broadband world (or whatever the equivalent is for your business).

Instead, spend your time on the basics, the constants, the things that won’t change. Figure out the equivalent of views, location, sunlight, and space in your business. Then be an animal about those features.

Human lamp
Check out how human the Lytegem Lamp seems.

Real time
Verbarius is “the first clock in the world that tells time the way people do.”

The clock spells out time differently every minute. It’s either forty-five minutes past four, or fifteen minutes to five, or four forty-five, or a quarter to five.

Ottoman to bed
Uber-ottoman: “t’s a stylish cubic ottoman + it’s a (hidden) guest bed.”

Mountain Tree House
Mountain Tree House was designed by architects Brian Bell and David Yocum. More photos at the site.

The Sun Jar
The sun jar, designed by Tobi Wong, stores sunlight. Have it sit in the sun during the day and it radiates at night.

This is a wonderful effect and the sandblasted glass makes it seem as if it truly emits warm sun light. It is a great little idea for an outdoor summer dinner, where you have the jars scattered around the table, or an evening at the beach where they will provide just the right amount of light, or as garden illumination, just position them at strategic points in your garden or rooftop terrace or balcony – they work equally well in either location.

More fun designs by Wong.

Sketch Pad is a cool New York Times column that asks architects or designers to create a vision of what an apartment, house, loft or shack now for sale might look like in order to “help real estate shoppers learn to see past ugly paint, too-small kitchens and a warren of rooms.”

In one of the columns, Updating the Trundle Bed, architects Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita of Front Studio give an imaginative makeover to a tiny, 380-square-foot studio. It’s a great case study that shows how embracing constraints can lead to creative solutions.

The big-picture goal was to get rid of clutter and give the idea of separation without actually closing off rooms. The top initial question: Where to put the bed? The solution: Raise the end of the living room about 18 inches, and slide the bed under it. This narrated slideshow explains the thinking behind the design (and lets you see the images without the gray bar in the middle).

Other similar hideaway solutions followed. The office and the kitchen are enclosed by translucent panels which don’t close them off the way walls would: “In a solution like a Rubik’s Cube, the corners can swing outward, opening the kitchen and the office to the living area. Make dinner or type a letter, then shut off the area for the rest of the evening.”

The idea for hiding the bed came to the architects during a trip to a Korean restaurant…

“In Asia, lots of things have double uses,” said Ms. Ha, who was born in Vietnam…

“We were frustrated thinking of all these different solutions, and we got hungry,” Ms. Yanagishita said. “We went to have Korean food in a restaurant on 32nd Street. We were eating kimchi — pickled cabbage — and we noticed the raised platform we were sitting on.

“Then all the little pieces came together like a Japanese puzzle box: things slide out, things fold in, things tuck away. It is clean, we hope, without any fussiness.”

We’ll be posting something about design for the home (or architecture) every day this week.

Hansen Living offers a minimalist, natural approach to kitchens that’s worth a look. Apartment Therapy took a luck at the company’s interesting approach: 1. They get ideas by asking pro chefs what they hate about consumer kitchens and then doing the opposite. 2. They try to limit space intentionally so people don’t fill it up with things they don’t need. 3. When clients ask for more, they tell them to wait 6 months and see if the need is still there (it rarely is).

Knud explained that when he embarked on designing Hansen’s product line, he asked some of the best chefs in Copenhagen what made them ‘laugh at the typical consumer kitchen.’ Then he did the opposite. The result is a collection of free-standing units with no overhead cabinets, but rather drawers below counters. Each drawer is lined with a metal perforated bottom to allow air circulation. The base pieces are raised on legs to allow access for cleaning the entire kitchen floor.

The chefs and Knud agree that overhead cabinets decrease the use of available counter space, increase the chances of hitting one’s head while chopping vegetables, and make any space look smaller. They also agree not to “give people too much space” or they might try to fill it with things they don’t need. In fact, Knud told me, if clients, ask for more cabinets once the kitchen is delivered, he encourages them to think about it for 6 more months and if they still feel a lack of space, they can call him and he’ll concede. According to Knud, they never call.

When you’ve got a small group, you don’t need to constantly formalize things. You communicate and you know what’s going on. If you have a question about something, you ask someone. Formalized rules, deadlines, and documents start to seem silly. Everyone’s already on the same page anyway.

Ten-groups
According to British author Antony Jay, there are centuries of evidence to support the idea that small groups are the most efficient. In “The Corporation Man,” he talks about how humans have worked in small groups, usually five to fifteen people, as hunters and farmers for hundreds of generations. The ideal group size is a ten-group:

He found the most efficient to be organised in groups of eight to fourteen people which he came to call ‘ten-groups’, each group free to find its own way towards a target set for it within the general objects of the corporation…

“The basic unit is [a group] which varies from three to twelve or fifteen in number, and perhaps optimizes somewhere around ten; that this group is bound together by a common objective, and that the bond of trust and loyalty thus formed can become an extremely powerful uniting force; that the group needs to decide on (or at least take part in deciding on) its own objective, and to work out for itself how that objective shall be achieved…”

He offers up interesting examples to back up the theory, from sports teams to juries to army squads:

Jay draws attention to units of around this size in many fields beyond the corporation. A committee works best with about ten members; if it grows much beyond that size the extra people do not take a fully active part. Nearly all team games use a group of about ten on each side. Juries have 12 members and the Jewish minyan 10. In an army, organization often decides life and death, and under this pressure armies, too, adopt a basic unit of about ten; the British army, the US army, the ancient Roman army and that of Genghiz Khan, in fact every long-standing successful army, has built up its larger formations from squads or sections of about this size.

That mention of the Roman army takes us back some two thousand years, and Jay traces the ten-group back still farther, back to the foraging communities. The ten-group, found today as a structural unit in successful corporations began, he argues, as the male hunting-group of pre-agricultural times, still with us and still functional.

We recently added a few new Highrise demo videos. Two of them show you how you can use your personal Highrise Dropbox email address and the last one walks you through the process of importing Outlook Express contacts into Highrise…

1. Send an email to a person page.
This video shows how you can use your dropbox to send an email to a person page in Highrise.

2. Create tasks via email.
This video shows you how to create a task by sending (or forwarding) an email to Highrise.

3. Get contacts out of Outlook and into Highrise.
Highrise lets you import contacts from a vCard file, Basecamp, Outlook, or ACT! This video shows you how to get contacts from Outlook Express into Highrise.

We also just added a new feature called File view to Highrise. There’s a video at the Product Blog showing you what it does and how it works.

Coudal Partners, our officemates, are a great example of what a design firm can do when it decides to take control of its own destiny.

Coudal used to generate revenues almost exclusively from client work. Anyone who’s done client work knows the inherent frustrations that come along with that. But instead of merely accepting these frustrations as “the real world” (aka The Way It Has To Be), Coudal searched for another path.

From Jewelboxing to Field Notes
When they had trouble finding great CD packaging, they realized other designers probably had the same issue. So Jewelboxing was born.

It was a hit and soon more products came down the pipe: lowercase tees, The Deck, Pinsetter, and Field Notes. Some were bigger hits than others, but, overall, the strategy has succeeded: Coudal now gets the majority of its income from products it creates.

And you can tell they’re having fun along the way too. They also created Swap Meat “in an attempt to make lots of people as happy as we are when the FedEx guy shows up unannounced.” And they even financed and shot a movie, Copy Goes Here, “for no very good reason.”

Client work
They still do client work, but it’s for clients who get it instead of whomever comes along. They partnered with a restaurant chain to do design work and agreed to a deal that involved a percentage of the business instead of just a flat rate.

Risky? Sure, but it’s paid off. Sometimes you need to risk to get reward. The reward for Coudal is a real sense of ownership in the project, from both a financial and creative standpoint.

Advice from Jim Coudal
I asked Jim Coudal if he had any advice for work-for-hire types that want to into selling their own products. His reply:

Two quick points. Not every idea is going to work. Know that going in. Ideas tend to follow the path of least resistance and more often than not that path is the one where you find yourself talking an idea to death, by getting hung up on the “what ifs.” So you need to actively push ideas out and embrace failure.  Fail spectacularly whenever possible.

Secondly, every single person I have ever met or corresponded with about leaving the work-for-hire world and trying to create something of their own, something that they really care about, says exactly the same thing. Win, lose or draw they always express the same thought and most of the time they say it in exactly these words.

What they say is, “I should have done this sooner.”

Part of Barack Obama’s campaign strategy is to expand the universe beyond traditional voters. However you feel about his politics, it’s an interesting approach. In fact, it’s got a bit in common with how we target nonconsumers with our products:

We’re mainly targeting people who have never used products like ours before. These people especially crave simple solutions. They were nonconsumers before because the alternatives had too many features, were too confusing, and were too expensive. We’re addressing a hungry market that’s been ignored for way too long.

Instead of trying to win over people who love Gantt charts, we built Basecamp to win over people who had never used project management software before.

Likewise, Obama isn’t trying to steal a share of “the existing market,” he’s trying to create a new one.

Rather than relying exclusively on special interests and big money donors, he’s gotten a large number of smaller donations from first-time donors via the web. (Long tail anyone?)

And instead of merely competing for the votes of currently registered voters, he’s focused strongly on getting blacks and people younger than 35 registered in prime states. (Encouraging first-time voters “is going to be a very big part of how we win” according to Obama’s deputy campaign manager.)

Whether you’re competing for an election or customers, there’s a lesson to learn here. If winning over the existing market is a longshot, woo those who aren’t even in the game yet.

“Ma Gastronomie” is a cookbook/biography by the great French chef Fernand Point (1897–1955).

Charlie Trotter says, “If someone said to me I could only have one cookbook, this is the one.”

Thomas Keller says, “I believe Fernand Point is one of the last true gourmands of the 20th century. His ruminations are extraordinary and thought-provoking. He has been an inspiration for legions of chefs.”

Keller told Charlie Rose (video below) that Point is the one chef, either living or dead, that he would like to meet. Every new employee at Keller’s restaurants, French Laundry and Per Se, has to read the book.

It’s more his feeling about food and his love affair with food…His point was you need to take ownership of what you do. Treat it like it’s yours and one day it will be. Have a true dedication and a true commitment to cuisine and that will elevate you beyond others.

Here’s one last post on Maverick: The Success Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, the Ricardo Semler book that has inspired 37signals in many ways. In this post, you’ll find some of Semler’s advice on how to work smarter…

Treat employees like adults:

We simply do not believe our employees have an interest in coming in late, leaving early, and doing as little as possible for as much money as their union can wheedle out of us. After all, these are the same people that raise children, join the PTA, elect mayors, governors, senators, and presidents. They are adults. At Semco, we treat them like adults. We trust them. We don’t make our employees ask permission to go to the bathroom, nor have security guards search them as they leave for the day. We get out of their way and let them do their jobs.

Write less (he’s talking about memo headlines that get to the point, but the same approach works well with email subject lines, post titles, etc.):

If you really want someone to evaluate a project’s chances, give them but a single page to do it — and make them write a headline that gets to the point, as in a newspaper. There’s no mistaking the conclusion of a memo that begins: “New Toaster Will Sell 20,000 Units for $2 Million Profit.”

And so Semco’s Headline Memo was born. The crucial information is at the top of the page. If you want to know more, read a paragraph or two. But there are no second pages…

This has not only reduced unnecessary paperwork, but has also helped us avoid meetings that were often needed to clarify ambiguous memos. Concision is worth the investment. The longer the message, the greater the chance of misinterpretation.

Of course, one-page memos took some getting used to. People sometimes had to rewrite them fie or ten times before managing to synthesize their thoughts.

This wouldn’t have surprised Mark Twain, who once apologized for writing a long letter because he didn’t have time to write a short one.