Last week, 30elm and Designmyroom teamed up to celebrate their official launches. Even with the frigid cold outside, more than a hundred of New York’s most fashionable home design professionals and enthusiasts made the trip to 535 Galleries in the Chelsea gallery district.

We were excited to get this email from Chelsea Holden Baker, the online editor for Dwell. Dwell is one of our favorite reads here at 30elm, they’ve really brought new attention to modern design in the last ten years since their founding. We’re honored to get this attention from them.

Click here to read the full review. Not too shabby, the only thing they knocked us on was our name.

The blog zenhabits recently picked up the project Minimalist Living by Swatt Architects.

The project is used in their post A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home to highlight how clean and simple a home can look. The article goes on to give tips on how a homeowner can take steps to achieve the same for themselves. The article (and home) was so popular it even showed up on Digg with over 2400 fans.

There’s been so very minor debate on 30elm over whether this truly constitutes a minimalist house, but, based on the home’s rating, everyone agrees it’s gorgeous.

Swatt architects is a full-service firm based in Emeryville, California. With more then 30 years of experience the company has racked up an equal number of local, regional and national design awards. This project was an addition added onto a home in Saratoga, California in 2005.

You can find out more about Swatt Architects here on 30elm, or at their website SwattArchitects.com Also be sure to checkout their recent book, Livable Modern filled with more luscious photographs of their gorgeous projects.

Todd Haley is a Chicago area interior decorator who designs for clients in the Chicago and New York metropolitan areas. Todd was given a “Stylemakers and Rulebreakers Award” by the Fashion Group International. We got a chance to speak to Mr. Haley about his unique style.

“My goal as a designer is to try to improve all the time.”

Carlos Rodriguez, the founder of the boutique architecture firm Rodriguez Studio, took a break from his busy schedule to tell me a little bit about his inspiration, his approach to design, and some tidbits you want to know about this up and coming architect.

“I came to New York City in the early 80s as a professional dancer.” Says Danny Colvin, principal and founder of Colvin Design, who spent 10 years as a Dancer and choreographer before becoming an architect. “When my body started to give out I went back to architecture school.”

Renowned for introducing America to authentic Mexican cuisine, chef Rick Bayless knows his way around a kitchen. Here’s his recommendations to help you do the same…

30elm presented yesterday at ApartmentTherapy’s New York Design Meetup. The Design Meetup brings together some of the brightest and most creative interior designer and product designers in the New York City area. It was a great experience to get feedback from this influential bunch.

Kristen Nicole wrote a bit about 30elm this morning, which is always nice to see. It’s true, we have some of the most beautiful rooms and houses, and the best designers in the country.

Though raised in a modest farmhouse in Lyons, renowned chef Daniel Boulud is no stranger to cutting-edge kitchens… Here are some of his kitchen essentials…

As our company has taken shape over the last six months we have often needed help & support. One resource that has been invaluable is the great NextNY group. NextNY is a group of more then 600 pros in the internet & tech space here in NYC who communicate via a Google Group, and increasingly, through social outings, panel discussions, etc.

The New York tech scene (aka Silicon Alley) has had a bit of a renaissance in the last year or two. One example of this can be seen when Chris & I attended an workshop on financing & term sheets at the NYC offices of Wilson Sonsoni. They wrapped up this session by asking each branch (Austin, Chicago, Seattle, etc) if they had any questions. When the videofeed turned on for New York it was obvious that at least twice as many startup entrepreneurs were present in New York then any of the other locations- including Palo Alto. There is a lot of great energy in New York right now- and the NextNY group helps work as an outlet for it.

We recently held our own workshop with a group of NextNY members. Our purpose was to get feedback on the design & functionality of the site, ahead of buttoning it up for beta. The panel was at the offices of Sportsvite with 10 top tech-heads. A range of experience was represented in various areas of the web; design, usability, marketing, IT/tech, etc. We got much interesting (and occasionally quite opinionated) feedback on what people would want the site to do for them and how. While we were only planning on an hour or two, we ended up talking for more then four hours. Much of this input we’ll use as we make decisions on how to arrange the homepage, which functions to push and which to let fall back a little. There’ll be much to see very soon!

Here’s a picture from the event by one of the of the core members of NextNY- Charlie O’Donnell. He wrote his own wrap-up post about the day.

Well the server has arrived and is currently being configured by some of the best minds in the Ruby-on-Rails world (who have coincidentally just started a Google Group on Rails deployment).

For our first server we went with a Dell with Dual processor, Dual-core AMD Opterons, 2 GB of ram and a hardware Raid 1. It ended up being chosen by taking the servers we could afford and then dividing the price by the estimated SpecWeb score for web hosting performance.

Here’s the requisite just out of the box pic- soon it will be among thousands of friends in a co-lo.

We have the hardware and we’re fast making progress on the development- although there is still much to do. We expect to have the first version of the site opened up for testing soon- so be sure to signup now. If there are no big problems we’ll quietly open up to the public a month or so later. Then we’ll be rolling along and ready for a bigger launch with all the requisite fanfare. The countdown is on!

Being a techie, I’m preoccupied (probably more than I need to be) about hosting, the platform and hardware that will power the site. I’m a big fan of the Webhostingtalk forums. There is a ton of really experienced web admins on the site. If you are at all interested in web hosting tech, it’s all too easy to spend a ton of time in WHT forums.

We’ve been using a VPS on Liquidweb for over a year for our email and ftp needs, and just recently switched off of it to Google Apps for your Domain for our email. So far we’ve found it to be rock solid- although the lack of IMAP can be annoying.

For web hosting, we have been using shared hosting for testing and are going to move to our own dedicated server in the next few weeks. We had looked at a few highly recommended dedicated server shops, including Softlayer, Steadfast and ServInt, but decided that it made more sense to buy our own server, and put it in a co-lo. It’s amazing what 2 grand can buy you now in a server – two dual core Xeon processors and a 250 GB Serial ATA hardware RAID 1. It’s still up in the air what flavor of Linux we will be using, although lately Debian has been thrown around a lot.

We are lucky in having development partners that are also on the cutting edge of high-performance Ruby on Rails web hosting. They are giving us a ton of advice and will also be doing much of the initial setup and management. If we haven’t mentioned it before we are proud to say that we are developing fully in Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL for our database.

We are still in the decision making stage for much of this so feel free to email me with your advice and I’ll be sure to post an update once everything is up and running.

My 3-year old son, Parker, and I spent a little time chatting about 30elm tonight. Our conversation went like this…

PARKER: Daddy, where were you?

ME: Daddy was upstairs working. Do you know what Daddy does?

PARKER: What?

ME: He is making a website.

PARKER: That’s funny.

ME: Do you know what the name of the website is?

PARKER: No

ME: It’s 30elm.

PARKER: That’s funny.

ME: No, really, it’s 30elm. Can you say 30elm?

PARKER: 30e-m-m

ME: Can you say, “Daddy is making a website named 30elm.”

PARKER: Daddy is making a website named 30e-m-m.

ME: Nice job! Give Daddy a high-five! (Parker gives me a high-five with soul.)

Now that Parker almost has the name down pat, maybe I can start talking to him about some of 30elm’s more interesting features between the YouTube videos and Pixar shorts we normally watch at bedtime.