Romance is the least planned occasion we deliver, which is why the logistics of a Mountain View doorstep matter more here than the design does. Roughly six in ten households in this city rent, and the housing stock reflects it: three-story complexes stacked along El Camino Real, West Middlefield Road, San Antonio Road, Evelyn Avenue and the Whisman Station blocks, courtyard buildings behind the downtown core, and the newer towers around the San Antonio center. Every one of them puts something between a driver and a door — a callbox, a locked lobby, a leasing office that signs for parcels, a package room with its own hours. For an ordinary delivery that is a minor nuisance. For a romantic one it is the whole risk, because a pickup slip taped to a door is the opposite of a surprise. Three lines in the note solve it: the gate or callbox code, the building letter and unit number, and whether the leasing office may accept on the resident's behalf. A mobile number is the fourth, and it is the one that rescues the order when the first three fail.
Proposals come up constantly, and there is one hard limit to know: a park is not a deliverable address. Shoreline Lake and the paths around it, the Stevens Creek Trail, the Permanente Creek path, Cuesta Park, and Rancho San Antonio with Deer Hollow Farm behind it are all beautiful places to ask a question and impossible places to hand flowers to a person who has not arrived yet. What works instead is staging. Have the arrangement delivered to the home in the morning so it is in the room when you get back. Have it sent to a hotel front desk with the guest surname exactly as the reservation reads, so it is upstairs before check-in — the Ameswell Hotel on Moffett Boulevard, Hotel Avante on East El Camino Real and Hotel Strata on West El Camino Real are the local options, with the Four Seasons Silicon Valley in East Palo Alto and Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park inside the radius. Or send to the restaurant, where the host stand rather than the table takes the handoff: the downtown blocks of Castro Street between Villa and Mercy are a pedestrian mall, so the driver parks on Villa, Dana or Bryant and walks, and small rooms like Chez TJ in its Victorian on Villa Street much prefer a four or five o'clock drop to a mid-service arrival.