THE EICHLER HOMEOWNERS
Spotlight on Joe Eichler's homeowners -- is there a
California temperament that inhabits the Eichlers?

From the pages of the Eichler Network newsletter
By Paul Adamson

Stylishly modern in appearance and built in the burgeoning postwar suburbs of the Bay Area, the Eichlers have seemed to many to embody the spirit of the emerging postwar California culture. The Eichler architecture indeed indicated a fresh approach to tract development, and the quick success of the earliest tracts proved there was an eager market for them. However, the market for Eichlers was never huge. Joseph Eichler never achieved the scale of more notable developers, such as William Levitt on the East Coast, for instance, who sold homes in the tens of thousands to first-time buyers at exactly the same time as Eichler was building his tracts of one or two hundred. Eichler's homes were so different from other suburban houses that his market niche was actually quite small. In fact, it is likely that if he had built any faster than he did -- a thousand per year at the height of his success -- he probably would have outpaced the number of people interested in his high-styled bungalows.

Who then were the Eichlers appealing to, and what did they find in Eichler subdivisions that they could not find elsewhere? Certainly the cost was reasonable. The affordability of the Eichlers accounted for some of the early sales, when returning veterans could take advantage of low-interest loans and buy Eichler's houses for very little initial investment. This made for dedicated residents, some of whom remain in the same houses almost 50 years later -- families grown, retired, and still happy to recall their good fortune. A case in point was the man we met one day while photographing Greenmeadow, in Palo Alto. Initially wary when he first saw us snooping around with our camera, he was reassured when he was told of our research. Now in his seventies, he said he had purchased his house in 1953 without even a down payment. However, as we talked, it was the community that he emphasized. He had become a neighborhood activist, and was evidently proud of his home and keenly loyal to his distinctive neighborhood, where, he explained, there was a pervasive and earnestly felt community spirit.

Good community was part of the original Eichler idea, and Eichler's subdivisions developed a sense of togetherness in ways that were both planned and spontaneous. The layouts were consciously composed to define a particular place, and this formal unity helped grow social bonds. A. Quincy Jones, Eichler's second architect, was particularly intent upon cultivating a basis for community with his designs, and pursued that goal in his first subdivision for Eichler, the 1952 Ladera Project in Portola Valley. 'Arts & Architecture' magazine published the subdivision and praised its "intelligent approach to the development of the community in terms of its people." At Greenmeadow, where Jones collaborated with Eichler's other architects, Anshen and Allen, the designers went the next step toward community planning by including the shared community center, and Eichler further formalized the neighborhood's interconnectedness by instituting joint ownership in the recreation center, and park -- an early manifestation of the Planned Unit Development concept. A feeling of community spirit grew up around the idea of shared investment, still a new idea in the early 1950s and '60s, but also around the less tangible issue of style.

As the initial burst of postwar house building swelled to fulfill the demand, mere affordability could not be relied upon to satisfy an increasingly demanding marketplace. 'Business Week' magazine remarked as early as 1953 that new buyers were beginning to expect more in their home purchases, and builders were going to have to be creative to satisfy their increasingly discriminating tastes. Eichler would continue to improve his designs -- adding rooms and refining the plans -- and his architects continued to refine their distinctively minimalist aesthetic. The elegant, stripped-down look and indoor-outdoor connections of this open planning suited an idiosyncratic but growing segment of the Bay Area population. In the South Bay, that included engineers and researchers who worked in the developing aerospace industry. The pure forms of Eichlers homes would appeal to this engineering crowd, who thrilled to the clarity of Eichler's solution to the modern California house. The author David Beers recalls his Lockheed-engineer father enthusing about the Eichlers. "The Eichler design stunned us," he said. "The low lines, all that glass. It had this California look to it." Feelings similar to this engineer's were common throughout the early subdivisions. A 1951 Stanford University business school survey noted the aspect of the Eichler homes that residents liked the most was the "modern design." The second most appreciated was the radiant heating, suggesting again the large numbers of engineering types who were attracted to the homes. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, the Eichler design appealed to a variety of people with specialized tastes, from researchers at Stanford to artists and architects in Marin.

Former Eichler salesman and three-time Eichler homeowner Frank LaHorgue indicates that Eichler residents have always been an interesting collection of people. He recalls that when he interviewed prospective buyers, it did not take long for him to decide whether they would be a good prospect. The Eichler buyers were a very heterogeneous group, he said -- different races and ages -- but all of them shared certain "core tendencies." They tended to be somewhat adventurous and often creative. Many were doctors, architects, and advertising people, none of which was looking for a traditional house. Those qualities that united Eichler buyers made them good neighbors regardless of their backgrounds, and the mix -- unusual for suburban developments -- made for especially vital communities.

Over time, the makeup of Eichler neighborhoods has often defied the stereotypical suburban demographic. Whereas suburbs are more often defined by a cycle of ownership from young families of fairly uniform income in newer developments to older, wealthier, and retired people in the more established neighborhoods, Eichler communities have tended to retain a broader cross section of residents. LaHorgue cites his own neighborhood of Upper Lucas Valley as an example, where retired people on fixed incomes live next door to the affluent and upwardly mobile. The income distribution suggests that there is something more compelling about an Eichler subdivision than prestige. Whereas a generally acknowledged sign of success, as well as a means to establish wealth, is a home in a "good neighborhood," there would seem to be plenty of Eichler residents who could afford luxurious settings, but chose instead to stay in their more modest, but perhaps more hospitable, communities.

The mix of people -- old, young, affluent and middle-income, those with young families and those whose children have grown - compose a community more often associated with urban areas or traditional villages than with the transient suburban metropolis. The hospitality of Eichler Homes' community planning seems particularly well developed at Lucas Valley, where a combination of elements - both fortuitous and preconceived - create a suburban model that might challenge some of the assumptions at the foundations of more ambitious and self-conscious efforts of the New Urbanists. Unlike the traditional town forms proposed by some of these architects, Lucas Valley suggests that modern planning can enable the patterns and habits of everyday life better than nostalgic replays of old village themes. Lucas Valley, with its rural backdrop, semi-casual arrangement of streets and multipurpose community center, seems to offer ample opportunities for the kind of formal social gatherings and accidental meetings between neighbors and neighbor children that traditional urban settings are famous for. At the same time, the houses offer the degree of privacy that may enable residents to be more tolerant of one another's differences than if they were always on display by way of the front porch or picture window.

It is obviously difficult to claim that there is an "Eichler type" of person, but many Eichler owners seem to exhibit a particularly Californian temperament. And the Bay Area Eichler subdivisions have certainly appealed to a segment of the population that shares many characteristics intrinsic to the Californian personality. Among the most-appealing characteristics is a tolerance of differences. And the combination of shared public space, open-planned interiors, and street-side privacy amount to an environment very conducive to a Californian lifestyle. Remarking in the national magazine 'Commentary' in 1956, the Stanford historian H. Stuart Hughes described the archetypal Californian and his preferred domestic environment, both of which seemed remarkably Eichler-like: "Virtually every oddity of behavior is permitted -- provided it does not disturb the neighbors. For -- contrary to what most Easterners think -- the Californian has a strong sense of privacy. He puts a high, solid fence around his garden and uses it as an outdoor room." Hughes may never have known any Eichler owners, but he got it right when he described the lifestyle they desired.

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