PALO ALTO, Calif.

ABOUT 50 years ago, the future touched down here in the form of a house and decided to make itself comfortable.

Back in the 1950's before they became the Bay Area's hot collectibles the architect-designed houses that Joseph Eichler built brought affordable Modernism to the masses. The houses' flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling windows, covered carports and toasty radiant heating embodied the constant search for happier, better living: postwar California optimism served sunny side up on a concrete slab.

But even Joseph Eichler, a retired butter- and-egg salesman who was inspired to begin a new career after living briefly in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, could not have foreseen the Eichler lifestyle, circa 2000, in which moneyed young techies fight over original Zolotone kitchen cabinets, and untouched Eichlers, built as low-cost starter homes, can go for $1.5 million.

"What we do in Silicon Valley is invent the future," said Christopher Dow, 35, a software designer who recently moved with his wife, Leslie, a molecular biologist, and three children into a frozen-in-time Eichler house here. "Unfortunately, you have to move into a 40-year-old house to be modern, because they don't build modern anymore."

Mr. Dow, who remembers watching the first moon landing from his grandmother's Eames lounge chair, is one of the new breed who have to have an Eichler. He and his wife were overjoyed to find a 1970's original, the dark brown carpet bearing the distinct silhouette of a water bed. It was perfect. "We wanted something that nobody had ruined yet," Ms. Dow said. 

The couple restored much of the cathedral-ceilinged house themselves, decorating it with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and other antiques and mixing Ikea with items off eBay. Rare orchids now sprout in the atrium, where the family dines alfresco beside an orange globe-shaped barbecue.

The Dows belong to the Eichler Network, an Ann Landers-style support group with a newsletter and a Web site for the 11,000 or so owners of Bay Area Eichlers. (The San Fernando Valley, outside Los Angeles, also has Eichler communities; six Eichler houses will be on the Los Angeles Conservancy's "How Modern Was My Valley" tour, Nov. 18 and 19.)

The network where it's all Eichler, all the time counsels a new generation on taking care of quirky, aging Modernist houses, from ailing heat piping below the floor and taut, often-leaky roofs to kitchen cabinetry suspended from the ceiling and known affectionately as "the flying coffin." The network even provides tips on atrium gardening and recipes for Eichler-era appetizers like mini-meatballs. 

Maintenance of Bay Area Eichlers is a $55 million-a-year cottage industry, said Marty Arbunich, the network's director. More important, perhaps, the network is becoming a political force, as the specter of monster houses dwarfing and even replacing unpretentious post-and-beam Eichler pavilions grows. The most crushing blow was the recent demolition of a custom Eichler in Atherton, a Silicon Valley town that is so exclusive the new owners paid $6 million for the privilege. Purists want to protect their
Eichlers from being replaced by towering pink stucco palaces or ignobly transformed into haciendas.

Last month, the city of Cupertino adopted the R1-e rule (the "e" stands for Eichler), requiring a design review for any second- story addition to an Eichler. "We wanted to keep the neighborhood as Eichlerlish as possible," said Nancy Burnett, 69, who watched her 1961 dream house in the Fairgrove subdivision being built from the slab up. It was the house she had yearned for in Sunset magazine. "Before I'd ever seen one, I knew I wanted to live in an Eichler," she said. 

The houses today are poignant snapshots of an era in which progressive design and planning were placed within reach of the average homeowner. "They spanned a breach rarely crossed between ordinary suburban life and avant-garde culture," said Paul Adamson, an architectural historian. "Their ability to cross over is what makes them so compelling."

Joseph Eichler, a man fond of cigars and colorful language, took modern architecture the realm of custom clients and turned it into a merchant builder's product. His experience of living in one of Frank Lloyd Wright's small, economic Usonian houses during World War II inspired him to become a home builder committed to high design for ordinary people (including members of minorities, whom he welcomed). Although he started with generic designs, Mr. Eichler soon sought to distinguish his products in the
booming postwar market, hiring top- flight Modernist architects like Robert Anshen, and A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons. In now nostalgic-feeling Greenmeadow, built here in 1954, and Upper Lucas Valley, which went up in Marin County between 1961 and 1966 both still revolve around their own schools, swimming pools and community centers he broke away from the typical subdivision Cape Cod saltbox to forge a modern
California style knit unassumingly into the landscape ("no meaningless brick," promised the sales literature, "no dinky chimney").

To original owners like Margaret and Jim Taylor she is now 77, he is 81 it wasn't a matter so much of style as the $3,500 down payment. "We thought it was quite a bit of room for the money," Mrs. Taylor recalled. "He was more than a contractor and builder. He had a vision of how he wanted people to live."

Somewhat nondescript on the outside, the houses' real innovations were in inner space: glass walls facing private outdoor living areas, including atriums, two bathrooms (with doors to the outside so that dirty children could be plunked directly into the bath), clerestories and an open kitchen (to allow "the lady of the house to share the fun and companionship of the family and friends as she works").

In model homes, Eames and Bertoia furniture mingled with hanging salamis and the aroma of roasting turkey, making modernism homey. "We weren't selling, we were educating," said Catherine Munson, a Marin County real estate broker who has sold some 3,000 Eichlers since 1958. She began as an Eichler hostess, demonstrating the pull-out swivel tables and giving prospective buyers' children chocolate milk.

Today, Eichler homeowners are divided among purists, realists willing to make some changes and people bent on turning their Eichlers into anything but. Nothing torments purists more than an Eichler decked out with Victorian cut-glass doors, lace curtains and picket fences. "Would anyone seriously consider putting carriage lamps and running boards on a sleek convertible?" asked K. C. Marcinik, an architect who, with her husband, Mark, specializes in saving Eichlers. 

New owners like Chris and Kristen Loew are determined to right past wrongs. Three years ago, Mr. Loew, 37, an industrial designer, and Ms. Loew, 33, a graphic designer, purchased a rare, all-steel prototype Eichler here designed by the progressive Modernist architect Raphael Soriano. Shingles had been applied to the exterior, la 70's hippie house, and an ungainly second story had been added. "From the outside it looked like a bat cave," Mr. Loew recalled. "I was about to storm in to tell the owners how they had ruined it, but then I walked in and was speechless."

What he saw was an interior space with "unbreakable logic," a Modernist gem with steel pillars and fluted ceiling, a glass wall overlooking a courtyard and a concrete block fireplace with an exposed cylindrical flue. The couple plan to remove the shingles and rescue the kitchen, once open but now a dark galley ("completely deviant," in Ms. Loew's words). 

The Marciniks advocate the creation of hyper-Eichlers, much like their own house in Greenmeadow. Replacing the original subdued hues, which bore names like Dawn Grey, Thatch and Bark, they painted each area a vibrant color, with contrasting white stripes in the grooves between the redwood wall planks. 

At their own house and in houses for clients like Kurt Taylor, 43, and B. J. Olson, 48, the Marciniks preserve the spirit but not the letter of Eichlers, reconfiguring kitchens and replacing Philippine mahogany or redwood cabinetry with zoomy concrete counters and luxurious African wood. "When I go into other people's houses that aren't Eichlers," Mr. Taylor observed, "I'm struck by how dark most houses are."

The blessing and curse of Eichlers is that many happen to sit in the heart of Silicon Valley, where tastes among the newly rich often run to freshly built Tuscan villas and medieval chateaus. With their single stories and simple roofs and entrances, Eichlers are particularly vulnerable to the tear-down syndrome. Some neighborhoods have longstanding architectural controls, and five Eichler neighborhoods here prohibit second- story additions. Other communities, like Balboa Highlands in the San Fernando
Valley, are considering similar rules. 

Not everyone approves of such newfound glorification. "Eichler had integrity, but his houses were indifferent to the street," said Daniel Solomon, an architect and professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "They are single-use, low-density houses oriented toward the car. They shared many characteristics of suburban sprawl but gave it a mantle of respectability."

Even those who have rediscovered them find a certain irony in rhapsodizing about a subdivision. "If you had told me 15 years ago that I'd be living here, I would have told you you were crazy," said Peter Schlosser, a 40-year-old architect. He and his wife, Alison Hart Schlosser (also an architect), and children live among rolling golden hills in Upper Lucas Valley, where strict architectural controls judge everything from exterior paint colors to rooftop air-conditioners (prohibited). "But Eichlers are unique," he continued. "They have a common flavor but aren't cookie-cutter."

High in the hills of San Mateo, Anna-Lise Pedersen, 77, owner of the X-100, a radical all-steel house built as an Eichler promotion in 1956, is on intimate terms with the future. She tends it daily, whenever she waters her seven indoor flower beds, or steps onto the pebbled circle-patterned floors, or parts the leaves of her Formica dining table to reveal two pristine Thermador burners perfect for grilling steak.

She hangs her laundry outside among the primrose-colored steel beams and takes evening showers as the moonlight peers through the clerestories. "I wouldn't change a thing," she said of the house. "You feel like you're all alone in a big world."

[ Home | About Us | Eichler Gallery | Eichlers For Sale | Home Improvements | Cyber-Cafe | Search | Resources]