Palo Alto: True Blue

Here’s a first for Palo Alto – a homeowner who painted his/her house electric blue, to match the color of the BMW MINI Cooper in the driveway.

It strikes me that the personality of the person who buys a MINI Cooper is similar to the person who decides to live in Palo Alto. Both buy into the concept that “small is beautiful.” They appreciate attention to detail and solid engineering. They’re the kind of people who “pimp” their rides and their houses.

My sister, who owns an egg-colored MINI and an egg-colored house, says that MINI owners are a friendly bunch. They always greet one another with a wave or nod, as if they all belong to the same secret club. You could say the same about Palo Altans.

On the BMW MINI website, Palo Altan wannabes can download a very useful house hunting tool, called the Desktop Decoy. You launch this screensaver when a new hot Palo Alto house comes onto the market, and you need to sneak out of the office to look at it immediately. (If you snooze, you lose.) Desktop Decoy fools the people in nearby cubicles into thinking you’re hard at work, with its clicking keyboard sounds and an occasional sneeze. It even places a series fake documents on your computer desktop, so that people think you stepped away for a quick shot of expresso.

It’s much easier than trying to explain how getting the first offer down on a two-bedroom $1-million house with indoor plumbing is “an emergency.”