Landscaping Refurbished at Eichler’s Old HQ

Joe Eichler’s former Palo Alto office has been returned to life, rebuilt, its interior redone, and its landscaping in part restored and in part reinterpreted. Landscape architect JC Miller based his work on the original landscape plan by Robert Royston. The office is at 1101 Embarcadero Road, and was built in 1957 as part of the Edgewood shopping center. Architects were Jones & Emmons.

“We retained as much of the Royston design as we could, because that was very important to me,” says Miller, a principal in the landscape architecture firm Vallier Design Associates. Miller previously worked for Royston’s firm and calls Royston “my mentor.”

Miller has written and lectured on Royston’s work, and on the history of modern landscape architecture in general.

His design, however, is not a pure restoration. “We did rehabilitation, adaptive reuse,” Miller says. “It was not a historic restoration by any means.”

“This project owner was respectful [of the historic design],” Miller says. “[But] he said of our project, ‘This was not a museum,’ and I am respectful of that.”

The developer, Peery Partners of Palo Alto, is handling the office, but not the rest of the shopping center. The office has recently been leased to a single tenant. Ben Crockett, one of the Peery partners, says the tenant is “a family office.”

“Regarding the landscaping,” Crockett says, “we sought out JC Miller given that he is the authority on Royston and a real master of mid-century modern landscape design, and we are thrilled at the final result.”

The landscaping is closer in keeping to the original design than the architecture of the building itself. From the outside the building seems close to the original -- though that’s hard to say for sure. Few if any good photos remain of the building’s exterior, and for many years shrubs and trees so obscured the building it was hard to get a good look at it.

Peery Partners did change the entryway, to open it up and lighten it, and removed the offices that filled the interior. A recent visit to the site showed the interior had been been gutted to create an open, flexible space.

The renovation of the Edgewood property proved fraught and took years to win approval, hindered by preservationists and some neighbors who hoped to preserve the only commercial center Eichler ever built. The retail portion of the center, heavily changed but still modern in appearance, opened last year.

For more than two decades, Eichler’s former headquarters was occupied by the Transcendental Meditation  program and the plantings had been allowed to take over, Miller says.

“Our goal  was to bring some light into the building,” he says. “There was no light there at all. There were trees lying on the roof.”

Working from an arborist’s report, Miller saved all the trees that he could, attentive also to the city of Palo Alto’s desire to preserve trees and replace those that are removed.

Three original birches, a signature element of the Royston plan, remain. Also remaining from Royston’s initial design are his characteristic circular fountain, circular planters, and circular concrete pads. Miller also restored interior patios with their benches.

Another Royston feature, a glass wall, was replaced with modern, tempered glass. When the original Royston wall came down, Miller says, neighbors grew uneasy. “When the glass fence came down, we got so many calls.”

In recreating the glass fence, Miller added a 21st  century touch – a string of LED lighting tape under the glass “so at night the glass panels just glow,” Miller says. “Now, inside the building at night and with the glowing panels, that indoor-outdoor thing you’re always striving for really is achieved there. It seems like the wall of the building is out there about 15 feet.”

Some changes were needed due to changes in how the building will be used. The entry was lightened up, with a glass doorway and smaller, lighter plantings than before, with permeable paving replacing the original gravel to provide more usable space for people to sit “and even do work there,” Miller says.

Large lawns on two sides of the building were reduced in size with native plantings added, to reduce water use. And the Royston fountain, while restored, will not be flowing anytime soon.

In recreating portions of Royston’s design that had been wiped away, including the southern garden, Miller had to do some conjecturing because no original plans remain. Miller, who knew Royston well, believes Royston based his design in part on a plan he’d recently done for an entry that was never built for an Eichler subdivision in Sunnyvale.

“What I can envision happening, I can hear Eichler calling Bob and saying, ‘Hey, I’m doing an office building. Can you doodle me up a little something like that subdivision entry in Sunnyvale we didn’t build?’” Miller says.

“This is purely conjecture, but I heard Bob talk about meeting Eichler for lunch at Sam’s," Miller says, referring to the San Francisco restaurant. "He said we’d meet here on projects and figure out things right here at his table.”

“I can see Bob, literally at Sam’s, drawing them out. I think this was sort of a back-of-the-napkin design. It’s definitely Royston, and it’s not really documented in the files.”

“Royston worked on over two dozen Eichler projects, including a couple of Joe Eichler's residences,” Miller says, “so that sort of familiarity would have allowed for such an approach.”

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