In 2013, Amie Neff and her husband bought their low-slung, light-filled home in Palo Alto, California. Neff was trained as an architect and had an excellent contractor, but the renovation of the 62-year-old house, built by developer Joseph Eichler, was immense—from relocating the front door and converting the garage into an ADU to adding ceiling lights, HVAC mini-splits, and solar panels. Rerouting the plumbing to move a bathroom was especially nightmarish.
“We had to have somebody come and use a heat gun to identify the pipes in the floor to avoid busting them,” Neff says. “They had to trench through a 10-inch slab with jackhammers. While this was going on, my family was trying to live in half of the house. We moved our kitchen behind the plastic screen and the refrigerator into the hallway. This went on for a couple of months.”
San Rafael designer-builder Stephen Shoup and his wife bought their 1956 Eichler when it was facing foreclosure in 2009. They took the house down to the studs, as many new Eichler owners do, and spent over four months on the renovation.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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“[The original house] was not in tear-down condition,” Shoup recalls. “I would characterize it as barely livable.”
Mid-century modern Eichler houses like these are also barely affordable. Today, many fully renovated family-size Eichlers go for over $3 million. A substantial remodel may cost hundreds of thousands—not to mention, take six months to a year.
For someone looking to renovate an original Eichler, built between 1949 and 1974, appreciation can quickly turn into obsession. The homes are decades old and have little to no insulation. There is no attic or basement; each house sits on a massive concrete slab. Glass walls are single-pane only; the kitchens and bathrooms are tiny.
Fortunately, if you do embark on an Eichler modernization project, you won’t weather it alone. There is no end of assistance from the “Eichlerites” community. Quora and Reddit forums, YouTube clips, and Facebook groups all offer endless advice and referrals to contractors who specialize in Eichlers. The owners understand that they seem a bit nuts. One Eichler Network forum post reads, “What other kind of home architecture has its own support group?” A Facebook group member writes, “Eichler owners are like Porsche owners, they wave at each other and like to share misery stories and recommend contractors.” “The views were wonderful,” a former Eichler owner replies, “but you needed a parka at times. Happy to have sold this substandard habitat.”
AFFORDABLE, MODERN LIVING
Every Eichler enthusiast knows the story. Joseph Eichler ran a grocery store in Burlingame, selling butter and eggs, chickens, rabbits, geese, and “real Italian salami.” In the mid-1940s, he moved his family to Hillsborough, where they lived in the Sidney Bazett House, a unique hexagonal structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Built with natural materials, it had innovative underfloor heating and expansive windows. Inspired by this new way of living, at age 45, Eichler changed careers.
Drawing on Wright’s Usonian principles of natural lighting, indoor/outdoor aesthetics, and an unusual overhang (which Wright named the carport), Eichler relaunched himself as a merchant builder, creating single-family homes for the postwar population boom. In 1950, he completed a new subdivision in Sunnyvale, having hired architect Robert Anshen to envision a neighborhood with radical new designs. All 50 units sold out within two weeks.
Eichler emphasized affordability and modernist design, and he insisted that his houses be sold to anyone regardless of race. With a postwar bank loan, qualified buyers could own a new Eichler for a minimal down payment of a few hundred dollars.
The brand image was clean and contemporary, sunny and warm, a blueprint of suburban happiness. A new California could be yours.
After decades of success in the subdivisions, Eichler turned his attention to early-’60s San Francisco. His most prominent city structure, the Summit, a prismatic high-rise condominium on Russian Hill, features fantastic bay views and attracted celebrity tenants like George P. and Charlotte Shultz, who occupied the two-story penthouse suite. But Eichler found himself mired in the city’s complex permitting process and overspent by $2 million on the construction of the Summit alone. His final San Francisco structures, the twin Geneva Towers, which opened in 1967, are remembered as a disastrous attempt at urban housing. The towers underwent an ownership transfer and deteriorated over years of poor management, during which drug dealing and incidents of violence became common occurrences (the buildings were demolished in 1998).
Eichler was hospitalized with heart problems the year before the towers opened and had to declare bankruptcy. He spent his last years in the suburbs, showing houses to buyers while his wife waited in the car. His final development, 30 homes in Palo Alto’s Los Arboles Addition, was completed after his death in 1974. By the 1980s, buyers were knocking down old Eichlers to build larger homes.
Decades later, nearly 11,000 Eichler homes still remain up and down the Golden State, in pockets from the North Bay to the Peninsula to Orange County. Publications like Dwell magazine, MCM Daily, and Atomic Ranch splash glorious color photos of sleek Eichler minimalism. But most Eichlers bear little resemblance to the shiny examples portrayed there or on realty websites. According to Marin real estate agent Renee Adelmann, who says she sees about 30 to 40 Eichlers sell each year in her area, roughly half of all models have never been updated. “In the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, they just kind of sat there,” says Adelmann. Today, many Eichlers look like, well, ordinary suburban homes. Exterior paint is chipped and faded; walls are covered in stucco, bricks, or shingles. Trees and shrubbery are overgrown. Cracked concrete driveways are lined with lion statues and plastic flamingos and crammed with pickups, rusted cars, boats, and campers.
And it’s not just Eichlers’ external features that have aged poorly—the memories made inside them have too. “I babysat in those homes in the 60s,” writes a member of an Eichler Facebook group. “They were the scariest moments ever.… Sparsely furnished, with very uncomfortable furniture, they made noise and the glass atrium surrounded the living room and family room. I never felt safe.”
Owner remodels from the ’70s to the early aughts were haphazard at best. Mahogany paneling was torn out and replaced with drywall. Redwood grooved ceilings were slathered in white paint. Open-air atriums were turned into extra bedrooms and kitchen pantries. Some owners even built another story on top of the roof.
All this changed in 2006 when Bay Area publisher Marty Arbunich launched CA-Modern magazine, a full-color printed adjunct to his existing Eichler Network newsletter. According to Dave Weinstein, a longtime CA-Modern columnist and features editor, the magazine and newsletter provided Eichler resources to owners, who often had no idea how to restore their house.
Arbunich hunted down Eichler homes throughout the state and added all the addresses to a mailing list. Anyone who lived in an Eichler automatically received the magazine. Many owners had no idea who had built their home or that it was a classic architectural design. Agents, observing the magazine’s growing audience, began marketing Eichlers as such, and their popularity started to grow. (The magazine folded in 2023. The newsletter still circulates via email twice a week.)
“Everybody can talk about their Eichlers,” Weinstein tells me. “It serves as a kind of glue in a neighborhood. Yes, they do attract creatives. They attract more liberals and Democrats than Republicans. More than most neighborhoods, they attract like-minded people.”
Based in Santa Clara County, Eric Boyenga and his wife, Janelle, have been selling Eichler homes for over 25 years. Their focus is the Peninsula and South Bay, an area containing the state’s largest clusters of Eichlers. Each year, they sell approximately 40 of them, from $1.4 million “fixer-uppers” to meticulously restored gems. Last year, they sold Joseph Eichler’s personal home in Atherton, for $5.5 million.
“That one was really special,” Boyenga says. “Eichler tried a lot of the techniques that he ended up implementing in the houses. A lot of custom finishes, built-in cabinetry, brought the siding from the outside…inside.”
With the Peninsula’s high concentration of tech wealth, it’s no surprise that Eichler sales are booming in Silicon Valley. There’s also an aesthetic appeal. “The houses reminded you of high-tech gear,” says Weinstein. “The tech industry fed into that.” In fact, there’s a rumor that Apple CEO Steve Jobs grew up in an Eichler near Monta Loma Park in Mountain View. It’s been disproved, but Jobs once admitted that the polished minimalism of Mac computers and iPods was inspired by mid-century modern design.
TO OWN THEM IS TO LOVE THEM
Mike (last name redacted, as is the preference of certain members of this design-centric support community) greets me at the entrance to his A-frame forest-green home, built in 1964 and designed by architect A. Quincy Jones. This is actually Mike’s second Eichler; his interest was piqued in the mid-’90s during a memorable visit to a beautifully maintained example. “It was like being transported into the 1960s,” recalls the retired advertising director. “[The house] had this retractable roof and a pool in the back. Diffused light and a beautiful garden. It was stunning.”
The price for the showpiece was far out of Mike and his young family’s range, but he kept looking. In 1995, he bought his first Eichler in a desirable South Bay neighborhood. The house didn’t need much renovation, and the sale price, roughly $500,000, would make today’s Eichler buyers weep.
Mike bought his current Eichler in 2002 in the same neighborhood. This model was more run-down. “These things are a pain in the ass to maintain,” he says over his shoulder as we walk through the front door and into the signature Eichler open-air atrium. “They’re hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You just have to be in love with them. Show ’em some love.”
Mike opens the door to the main house, and I feel the rush of an Eichler living space for the first time. The sheer amount of glass is astonishing. The space is light and airy, tastefully decorated, a terrarium of possibility. If a house can seem optimistic, this one surely does. Mount Diablo is visible from the kitchen windows.
We talk about Mike’s 2003 renovation. With the help of contractors, he took the home down to the studs. They replaced the roof and the linoleum flooring, rebuilt the radiant floor heating, and completely redid the kitchen. Mike also upgraded the bathrooms and added an outdoor deck, but kept the original ceiling, globe lights, and wood paneling. The renovation took six months and cost over $200,000 in today’s money.
“It just gets more and more expensive,” he says. “One pane of glass for an Eichler now costs $1,200 to $1,400 apiece.”
Mike is very plugged into the community. He’s saved all his copies of CA-Modern and knows all his Eichler neighbors. They text one another tips on things like how to deal with moisture in the garage. Mike asks me for my initial impression, since this is the first Eichler I’ve ever entered. The word expansiveness immediately comes to mind. Also, I wonder how I could afford one of these. Is it too late to get into crypto?•
Jack Boulware runs the newsletter What Jack Boulware Fails to Realize. He was a cofounder and an executive director of San Francisco’s Litquake literary festival. He’s currently working on a novel based on his experiences as a travel journalist. He lives in West Marin.
