Original Owner Says Second Stories Don’t Work

To outsiders, the anger that grips Eichler homeowners when monster homes threaten to set down in their neighborhoods seems incomprehensible. It can also seem selfish.

What’s there to worry about? The home is going up next door to you, or down the street. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it. Let private homeowners do what they want with their private homes.

But these are outsiders who don’t understand a couple of things – well, maybe more than a couple of things – about Eichler homes and Eichler homeowners.

The first is that Eichlers, along with some other mid-century modern homes, provide inhabitants with a very special sort of light, and a very special relationship to the out of doors.

The second is, these were designed as neighborhoods, not as individual homes. So many residents have the attitude 'what happens in my neighborhood happens to me.'

Spend time talking to Bonnie Borton, an original Eichler owner who has lived in her lovely, very original and very private Eichler home for well over 50 years, and you may pick up on this.

Bonnie lives in Los Arboles, which seems to be the furthest along of any Palo Alto neighborhood in pursuing to preserve its character by seeking to be zoned with 'a single-story overlay' to ban two-story homes or second-story additions.

Although she is not leading the charge – she’s leaving that to the younger folks – she supports it strongly.

“I’m older,” she says, “and I’ve been here a while, and I’ve seen a few [second-story additions] go up, and I think, no, I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”

The proposed overlay zone has won informal support from both City Council members and the city's Planning and Transportation Commision. City officials have also voiced willingness to waive a fee charged to neighborhoods seeking such a zoning change.

Her reasons speak to the quality of the architecture, and to the life it allows residents to lead. And her reasons speak to the quality of the neighborhood and her neighbors.

“Sitting here in the kitchen, I can look through that clerestory [window], and I can look to the front and to the back, and what I am seeing is trees. I think it’s really great. What would I be looking at if there was a second story[(on the house next door]? I’d be looking into somebody’s bedroom.”

“My feeling is, I believe that that these homes are special. I truly do. They are so livable. Yes, they’re different. But they’re unique. You have a view from just about any place you want to be in the house, except the bathroom. I like that. I’m in favor of keeping it.”

“It’s like living outside as well as inside, and that was Eichler’s point. It was part of what he was trying to do.”

Bonnie’s concerns go beyond the house that sits next to her. Several second-story additions have been built in the neighborhood over the years, she says, and she feels sorry for those who have lost privacy and views, and hopes no one else has to suffer those consequences.

“This is not a neighborhood for second stories. I don’t think so,” she says.

Bonnie, who grew up around Hyde Park, New York, and found work as a stewardess for United Airlines, also found her husband Harry at United. For their honeymoon, Bonnie, who’d spent a year in Oakland as a girl, showed Harry up and down the state with one thing in mind.

“I remember growing up, I said I’m going to live in California,” she says.

Harry and a buddy, both pilots, managed to get assigned from Chicago to San Francisco. Within a few years both couples were living in Eichlers. It was a fine life, Bonnie remembers, raising a girl and a boy, the children playing safely on the street, the family taking jaunts in their private plane.

Borton’s house remains largely original. “I haven’t changed any of the actual rooms,” she says, though she did add wallpaper to some of the mahogany paneling to lighten things up. “But basically it’s pretty much the way it was.”

“It’s interesting,” she says, “because early on, it never crossed my mind that somebody might even consider putting a second story on.”

“Then one did, and it just seemed like it happened, and we all accepted it kind of as an anomaly,” she says, adding that the first second story happened about 30 years ago. “But once one goes up, you’re likely to have a lot more unless something takes place.”

“I thought to myself, why add a second story? They didn’t have a big family. I could understand someone with seven children.”

A few years later, she recalls, one family that did have seven children gave the neighborhood its second second story.

But nobody raised a ruckus about it, she says. “We all had young children, and maybe we were too busy raising our kids to worry about second stories on our houses.”

Los Arboles – it means ‘the trees in Spanish’ – is aptly named, with cork oaks, holly oaks, and many other trees forming a grand canopy over the neighborhood. Bonnie Borton remembers Al Moncharsh– Joe’s brother-in-law, and the lead salesman there – planting the trees.

She remembers when her next-door neighbor complained to Al because the tree he planted between their two houses was too scrawny. Al replaced it with something larger.

“It’s a good neighborhood,” Bonnie says of Los Arboles, mentioning the annual summer barbecue and neighbors who look out for each other. “We’ve got a lot of people who care about it and have always cared about it, and that’s what makes it special.”

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