EICHLER'S EARLY YEARS: 1951-'52
Award-winning experiments of design innovation
-- touring Eichler's early California subdivisions

From the pages of the
Eichler Network newsletter
By David Weinstein

Charleston Meadow was very much a work in progress when the LaRivieres, the Schills, and the Rokitas arrived in early 1951. Joe Eichler's subdivision was bursting from the ground in Palo Alto's undeveloped eastern boondocks, which were still unincorporated and without city water. "This was the country," Herbert Rokita recalls.

Mud was everywhere. Wooden ceiling planks were laid over the mud to serve as walkways for workers, and then nailed atop roof rafters. "Could you believe that we had footprints on the ceiling?" Phil LaRiviere asks. The wood was so new, it was still drying out -- audibly. "In the middle of the night you'd hear it," Phil remembers. "Pop!"

Unlike Eichler's later developments, or even his more upscale Ladera and Oakdell Park plans from the same period, Charleston Meadow was being built without sidewalks, fences, or landscaping. And one exterior amenity that was provided, gravel-topped asphalt driveways, caused grief. "All the gravel was tracked into the houses," Phil says. "That gravel was all over the place."

But the newcomers were young and resilient well-educated professionals who weren't afraid to improvise. They spotted leftover concrete blocks at the construction yard. "Everybody went down to the yard and stole as many stepping stones as possible," Phil says.

The men built fences in a communal scene that recalled old barn raisings. And no one forgets Charleston Meadow's unusually rainy first winter, when construction trucks rumbling across people's future yards compacted the soil, or the woman from West Virginia who put a stop to it.

"Quit driving through," the woman ordered the truckers. "We'll never be able to plant." When they kept coming, Florence LaRiviere says of her former neighbor, "She got a shotgun out and placed a lawn chair on the patio and sat with the gun on her knees and said, 'The next guy who comes by gets a shot into his tires.' They stopped."

Today Charleston Meadow is a mature neighborhood that retains much of its original charm, and a surprising number of original residents. It's also part of that open-air Eichler museum known as 'the Peninsula,' where, on a long afternoon, the aficionados of modern architecture can conduct their own chronological tour of Eichler's neighborhoods from 1951 and '52.

The tour, which hits Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, and Portola Valley, demonstrates how Eichler's architects modified home plans and facades to fit the contemporary lifestyle while providing variety and pleasure, and arrayed homes on the land not to maximize the number of lots but to create a community.

People noticed. Several of Eichler's early neighborhoods won professional awards, including the Housing Research Foundation's 1951 'Award of Merit' for Palo Alto neighborhoods. This was no glad-handing panel. It included editors of leading architectural magazines, architectural historians, and International Style architect Philip Johnson.

What our tour of the 1951-'52 Eichler developments shows more than anything else is that Joe Eichler never stopped experimenting. Eichler developments were always a work in progress. It also shows just how successful Eichler was early on in producing livable, innovative neighborhoods with some extraordinary houses. Some of these neighborhoods remain remarkably well preserved, others moderately so. Some may not remain with us for long.

Charleston Meadow
Palo Alto • Approx. 100 homes
Architect: Anshen + Allen

Eichler bragged that his neighborhoods attracted many architects. Three or four quickly settled in the roughly 100-home Charleston Meadow after houses went on sale at the start of 1951. Just as telling, at least two original buyers were sent to the neighborhood by leading Bay Area modernist architects.

Herbert Rokita was a civil engineer and a fan of good design in Berkeley when he asked architect Fred Langhorst to design his family a home in Berkeley. But Langhorst, who had been designing low-slung Bay Region style homes since the 1940s with his partner and wife Lois, was leaving for Italy. Check out Eichler, he advised.

Fred Schill got similar advice from Joseph Allen Stein, who helped design the original Ladera neighborhood in Portola Valley (before Eichler took over part of the development), and later created office and residential complexes in India.

Homes in Charleston Meadow were designed by Anshen + Allen and follow seven different floor plans, plus variants created by flipping the plan, according to Rokita, one of the neighborhood's several unofficial historians. Many roofs are low-pitched with wide overhangs and clerestory windows in the gable ends. Narrow vertical windows peer quizzically at the street from either side of the fireplace. "Who in their right mind puts glass by brick?" Rokita asks affectionately.

Phil LaRiviere brags that Charleston Meadow is one of the last Eichler subdivisions to use exterior tongue-and-groove redwood siding, not redwood plywood scored to look like individual boards. "It's called vertical groove rustic," he says.

The mullions holding the glass together between the LaRivieres' living room and backyard are of wood. The model home had aluminum, Phil said, but the Korean War had first dibs on metal. "The wood obstructs your view," he says. "The aluminum was almost invisible." But Phil has gotten used to it. Each home also has a Dutch door to the yard. Moms appreciated how they kept their babies from wandering outside.

Homes came well equipped. The LaRivieres appreciated getting a stove and washing machine with the house. "Many families couldn't afford to get a separate loan for them," Florence remembers. Several residents still have their original enameled metal kitchen cabinets.

Charleston Meadow's homes, which were first marketed from $11,950 to $13,700, are small, three bedrooms and one bath, with a narrow kitchen separated by cabinets from the living area. The LaRivieres' was originally 1,250 square feet; Phil added a compatible 650-foot addition in 1956.

The LaRivieres had plenty of room for their three children, they say, and for many others besides. Like their neighbors, the LaRivieres appreciate their home's artistry. But when they gather to talk about the neighborhood -- as they did recently at the request of the Eichler Network -- talk turns not to architecture but to the life it helped shape.

Florence remembers the camaraderie. Most of the men were a few years out of the service, white collar, and commuting to San Francisco. While only a few of them worked at nearby Stanford University, many nonetheless were intellectuals, including the wives, says John Badenhop, who grew up in the neighborhood. "And they were all people interested in this kind of house," he says. Badenhop remembers a wonderful neighborhood for kids, who roamed freely through streets and fields and their neighbors' houses. "A mother might serve dinner to who-knew-whose kids," he says. John loved growing up with natural light flooding the house. He remembers lying on the radiant-heated floor on rainy days, looking outside with his face pressed against the glass.

Today Charleston Meadow is again filled with children, as younger families have moved in. The neighborhood is largely intact, amidst a forest of oaks, sycamore, and pines. A handful of new homes have replaced the original Eichlers, and there have been a few two-story additions, which so distressed some owners that the Charleston Meadow Homeowners Association has re-established its architectural control committee to ensure that exterior changes are appropriate. Eichler architect Bob Anshen and Joe Eichler were founders of the original committee.

Few interiors have gone 50 years without remodeling, and the interior paneling painted or sheet rocked over. And there have been many additions. Still, Fred Schill says, the neighborhood looks a lot like it did when it was built. "You can grow old in these houses," says Florence. Badenhop, who lives in Atherton, is only sorry about one thing: "I hate the fact that many of us have moved away."

Fairmeadow
Palo Alto • Approx. 167 homes
Architect: Anshen + Allen

Carroll Rankin remembers the excitement he felt as he drove his wife Laura into 'the Circles' to see their new home. "But I couldn't find it," he says. That was 1959, and residents of Fairmeadow, as this concentric series of streets is known, had already had eight years to learn their way about the maze-like 167-home subdivision, just down the street from Charleston Meadow.

Fairmeadow's Eichler homes went on sale in May 1951, a few months after Charleston Meadow. The homes, four basic plans and multiple elevations designed by A. Quincy Jones of Jones & Emmons, were slightly larger and costlier ($15,200 to $15,950) than Charleston Meadow. All had three bedrooms and two baths, versus Charleston Meadows' one.

A typical home in Fairmeadow wears a low-pitched gable roof with a peculiar aspect. The roof takes on a second, steeper pitch as it drops to cover the exposed rafter ends, giving it a bit of a Dutch Colonial look. Other homes in the subdivision have flat roofs. The simple roofs emphasize the homes' horizontality and make them seem much larger than they are.

Rankin, who today lives in another nearby Palo Alto Eichler development, Greenmeadow, remembers one disadvantage to the clerestory windows that fill Fairmeadow's gable ends. It was impossible to find window coverings that would fit. "You'd wake up in the morning when the sun comes up. You couldn't draw the blinds."

But what really makes Fairmeadow distinctive is its street layout formed from three distinct concentric circles, designed (as were most Eichler site plans at the time) by Anshen + Allen. The goal wasn't to be clever, but to create a neighborhood that would avoid the monotony that gripped so much of suburbia.

In their 1957 book, 'Builders' Homes for Better Living,' Jones and Emmons included the Fairmeadow plan in their chapter on 'The Planned Environment.' Their argument: "A good house alone is not enough." What is needed, they said, is "a well-planned community (that) allows its families to live conveniently, comfortably, and safely." In advertisements for Fairmeadow, which was named 'Subdivision of the Year' by Architectural Forum, Eichler noted its proximity to elementary and junior high schools.

Besides giving visual interest to the area's flat, featureless terrain, the circular plan eliminated through traffic. It also helped create a vibrant community, Rankin says. He remembers his daughter Gratia, eight when they moved in, running up and down the streets with her friends. Many neighborhood kids were the same age, and through Gratia the Rankins met their neighbors.

Rankin is an architect who takes Eichler seriously; he is also a member of Eichler Historic Quest, a committee that is presently guiding Palo Alto's Greenmeadow and Green Gables to historic status on the National Register. Rankin's quick to protest when critics say that, by turning their back on the street, Eichler homes are anti-social. What that criticism misses, he says, is how the neighborhood as a whole functions. "In both the Circles and Greenmeadow, all of our neighbors have been friends all those years," he says. "We still get together."

Jim and Claire Moore moved into their Fairmeadow home in 1965. It was their second marriage, and they had six children between them. Jim, who had raised turkey and ducks in Wisconsin, was design savvy and had taken a course in town planning while a student at Cornell University in 1939. Circular plans and cul-de-sacs, he says, were "the big buzz."

The Moores loved raising their children in Fairmeadow. Most women were stay-at-home moms. Of the 22 homes on their circle, eight sent kids to kindergarten every morning, Claire remembers. Community life revolved around the street. "We would always drive very carefully on this circle," she says, "because there would always be a group of kids out there playing ball in the street."

Fairmeadow remains a well-preserved Eichler neighborhood even though there is no overall neighborhood association and no Eichler-specific preservation guidelines in place. But when Rankin drives about today, he wonders how long Fairmeadow will remain well-preserved. One unpretentious Eichler has been turned into a Tuscan villa with Roman columns.

"Oh man, oh man," Rankin says. He's particularly down on remodels that add a story because, he says, they invariably look bad. "That's why you shouldn't even try," he says, gesturing towards one, "because you can't succeed."

Jim Moore says most neighbors care more about quality of life than architectural purity. "People are interested in having a stable, quiet neighborhood where their children are safe and where, if they work hard, they can afford to live."

Oakdell Park
Menlo Park • 16 homes
Architect: Anshen + Allen, Jones & Emmons

One of Eichler's smallest subdivisions, Oakdell Park is an enclave of 16 homes clustered around a pair of cul-de-sacs and two once-quiet connecting streets in Menlo Park. The development, which opened in 1952, features some of Anshen + Allen's and Jones & Emmons' most inspired designs. But because the homes are surrounded by 'traditional' homes (originally simple 1920s bungalows, but more and more often by pretentious mini-mansions), it doesn't look like an Eichler neighborhood.

Flo Barr, who has lived in Oakdell Park for 41 years, says that Eichlers are such a small part of her overall Menlo Park neighborhood that most current residents aren't even aware of the name 'Oakdell Park.'

Oakdell Park's use of cul-de-sacs and several trapezoidal lots produces a quiet streetscape that provides maximum privacy for each home. Oakdell Park was a relatively upscale neighborhood, with homes originally selling for $25,000 to $29,500 in 1952. Amenities included completely fenced yards, master bedrooms with dressing rooms, two bathrooms, mature trees (Barr's neighbor, Kathy Trapnell, has a 400-plus-year-old oak dominating her backyard), and enough room, the ads proclaimed, for a swimming pool.

In 1952, 'House Beautiful' proclaimed an Anshen + Allen model from Oakdell Park "a little house with big house amenities," and went on: "This house illustrates just about every point you can think of to get the most livability for the least money."

Trapnell, an interior designer, chose her home 24 years ago to ensure getting her daughter into Menlo-Atherton High School. She also gardens, and loves the home's indoor-outdoor flow. "It's almost like living outdoors, for me," she says.

The façade of Trapnell's 1,300-square-foot, shallow-gabled home is bland. From the front, all you see are the blank walls of a utility shed on one side of the carport and a bedroom on the other. The front door is hidden in the carport. But when Trapnell opens the front door, the drama unfolds. You look clear through into the backyard. Visually the home becomes an abstract composition of windows and walls, spaces and planes. "It's all rectangles and squares," Trapnell observes.

There's the vertical window that rises alongside the door, and the clerestory window above the door. Another clerestory window runs clear to the end of the house, bringing light into the kitchen. Yet another does the same for the master bedroom. Need more light? There's a carport skylight over the front door, a matching skylight in the kitchen, and a third one a few feet away in a foyer.

The visual play of solids and voids is enticing and occasionally sly. Consider the closets, seven feet high and serving as walls between bedrooms. Atop several closets are horizontal windows providing extra light and a sense of space while maintaining privacy.

There is nothing bland about the façade of Barr's house, which looks ready to take flight. Its low, soaring gable seems to float, thanks to the clerestory windows that separate it from apparent solid support. Adding excitement is the jagged, zigzag shape of the roof. It's a single gable, but it seems like two because half of the roof juts out ten feet from the main mass. The overhangs are immense. An unusual touch for an Eichler home is the band of eye-level windows that face the street and provide light for a pair of bedrooms.

Barr's home, which includes a two-car garage, divides its interior hallway from the living space by suspending two tiers of bookshelves from the ceiling above a low line of cabinets. The shelves seem like lines zipping through space, and bring the motif of flight into the house. Barr's home has original, beautifully grained mahogany paneling in the living room and bedrooms. Her kitchen is also original. "There aren't too many that have had so little done to them," she says. "It's because I love it just the way it is."

But all may not bode well for Oakdell Park. "I've enjoyed it so much," Barr says of her home. "But when I sell it, you can see what's going on around here. It will be demolished and that will be too bad. But young families want more house." Trapnell agrees. "I'm not going to put much money into it because it's going to be a scraper," she says of her home. "It bothers me tremendously," she adds. "It's been a good house."

Photos by David Toerge; others courtesy LaRiviere family

This story revisits Eichler's pioneering developments from 1951-52. Our earlier companion feature, covering the years 1949-50, was first published in the Spring 1999 issue of the Eichler Network newsletter. It can now be found on the 'Feature Storyboard' section here.

See other Eichler Modern Stories