An Eichler House That’s Gone to the Dogs

It started out of necessity – Hazel Jacoby just couldn’t imagine her two dogs getting soaked when she ran to the store. But it emerged as art, thanks to a creative neighbor who built her a dog house Eichler style.

“The first thing you have to understand is, I have Newfoundlands,” she says. “It’s not a teeny tiny doghouse. But it is smaller than a real house.”

“I leave them out when I’m running errands,” Jacoby says, speaking as dog owners often do in the present tense about her dogs, although one passed away several years ago. “When I left them inside they ate papers or cardboard, just to let me know they weren’t happy about being left alone.”

“I just felt pretty bad whenever I went away and they were outside and it was raining,” says Jacoby, who lives in the Eichler neighborhood Greenridge in Castro Valley. “That was before I found out they didn’t mind be out in the rain.”

She found herself discussing the situation with neighbor Abe Cirimele, who lives in a neighboring Eichler and was known as the neighborhood woodworker – and a woodworker with an artistic touch.

“He’d always enjoyed doing woodwork,” she says, “and had done lot of the fences around here. He had also built a small house for a kitty cat.”

“I was talking about a doghouse. He said, ‘I have some Plexiglass. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to build them an Eichler.’ ”

Jacoby supplied the Eichler siding, which she had because she had recently replaced some on her home.

“When you think of a doghouse you think of something like a three sided shelter and roof. Abe tends to go all out. There are little windows all along the roofline. There are narrow vertical windows also, like in some Eichlers,” Jacoby says.

“It does not have an atrium,” she adds. “It’s a one-room Eichler.”

“Anbody who sees it,” she says, “just kind of laughs at it.”

Cirimele, a retired meat cutter who’s lived in Greenridge 37 years, has built many fences, gates, Japanese-style bridges, and pagodas, throughout the neighborhood, and elsewhere. He also recently built the neighborhood’s new Little Free Library. He works through word of mouth, for neighbors and friends, and says he enjoyed building the dog house.

“Anything I do is fun. It’s all fun. That’s why I do it,” he says.

Suprisingly, given the number of dogs in the neighborhood, it is the only dog house he has built. “A neighbor wanted a cat house,” he says, “so I built a cat house, made it look like an Eichler.”

“Abe did a great job,” Jacoby says. “Another set of neighbors painted it to match my house. I was out of town and I cam e home and it was all painted.”

The dog house, built in 2006, attracted attention right away. “When it was first built, we had a neighborhood picnic and after the picnic people were invited to come look,” she says. “One of my neighbors said, ‘Oh good, now I know where to go if my wife gets angry at me and I get kicked out.”

The dog house is big enough to accommodate a person, she says. And dogs are not its only users. “I will admit that I have found neighborhood cats sleeping in there in the afternoon too.”

Her dogs, the late Tedi Bear, a female, and Chex, a male, were both rescue dogs, and Jacoby is a stalwart with Newfoundland Health and Rescue. “Newfies are big,” she says, “but their personality is love. They love people, they love other animals. They just hang out with everybody.”

Chex serves as a popular therapy dog at Camp Arroyo in Livermore, where the Taylor Family Foundation cares for ailing children.

“He’s a good builder,” Jacoby says of Cirimele. “He makes things that last. (The dog house) may well last longer than my house.

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