This is the chalet that our group has been staying in for the last week:

• We've been calling it a tree house. It is 5 levels in total. And you circulate through the house using a spiral staircase in the center of it. It's space efficient, but there are a lot of stairs.

• The site is downhill from the road, which, as we have talked about before, creates a more challenging build than uphill from the road.

• You enter the chalet on the third level, which itself houses 2 bedrooms. One floor below and one floor above also have 2 bedrooms, meaning there are 6 bedrooms in total. On the lowest floor is an indoor hot tub, a shared parking garage, and a shared ski/snowboard room.

• Every mountain house needs, at a minimum, two things: a fireplace and a hot tub. Ideally the latter is outside.

• As is typical in the mountains, the main living space is on the top floor (level 5 in this case). You want this for the views. If you're building into a sloping site, the lowest floors are usually somewhat constrained.

• We did the same thing with Parkview Mountain House. But it does mean that you circulate through the more "private" spaces within the house before reaching the more "public" ones. This is the opposite of what happens in most homes.

• The underground parking garage is accessed by way of a small parking elevator that lowers you down two floors. Initially this seemed excessive, but it is a shared elevator/garage. The chalet is semi-detached chalet, if you will, and so this was probably the only way they could get enough parking on the site. Assuming our attached neighbor is of a similar size, that's 12 bedrooms.

• It also creates an important pathway so that people don't need to bring their skis and snowboards through the house.

Every site has its challenges and that is especially the case in the mountains.

I was out for brunch last weekend with a few close friends from high school. It’s a “monthly reunion” that happens nowhere close to every month. But the hope is certainly there.

During brunch the topic of my blog came up. And one of my friends asked me how I got started and how the hell I keep up with one blog post every single day. (I get that second question all the time.)

I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s worth revisiting.

Earlier this week venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a post on his blog called The Blank Screen. And I really liked how he described the experience of writing a daily blog post:

Sometimes this process produces great insights for me and possibly others. Sometimes it produces garbage. But I’ve come to realize that the daily post, and its quality or lack thereof, is not really the thing. It is the ritual, the practice, the frequency, the habit, and the discipline that matters most to me. And, I would suspect, the same is true of the readers and commenters who frequent this blog.

Fred’s blog was a major source of inspiration for me. I saw him doing it. I saw the value he was getting out of it. And I wanted to do it too. So I did, almost 2 years ago. 

But he also inspired me in another way.

Venture capital and real estate development share many similarities in my mind, even down to the way that deals are often structured with preferred returns and promotes.

But the interesting thing about venture capital is that it went from a largely closed and “ivory tower” kind of industry to now one where almost every venture capitalist blogs, tweets, and strives for greater transparency (when possible).

I thought this was a fascinating shift and it made me think that the exact same thing was bound to happen in real estate development. So I am trying to make that happen. Hopefully this blog is helping.