Eichler's Army Renowned Bay Area builder's designs have legions of fans Richard Paoli,  SF Chronicle Real Estate Editor Sunday, April 22, 2001

Let us define things clearly: Only a home built by Joseph Eichler is an Eichler home. If you own one of the 11,000 unique homes Eichler built over two decades starting in the 1950s, you know you're living in a piece of American history. Call it pride of place. And the place for most Eichler homes is the Bay Area. About 600 were built in Southern California. Three were built in New York -- a failed effort to take innovative housing from West to East. The Peninsula has most of Eichler's homes. His company built 1,500 in San Mateo and 3,000 in Palo Alto. Another 2,500 were built in South Bay communities. Eichler, who died in 1974, also built 2,000 homes in San Rafael and another 1,000 in the East Bay. So, what kind of home did Eichler build? Whatever it was, owners of these homes are quick to respond to any misinformation. A headline on a feature story on a San Francisco home in the Real Estate section two weeks mistakenly referred to the '50s-style house as an Eichler. It's a fine home, responded a number of readers -- all of them Eichler owners -- but it's not an Eichler-built home. Only a Joseph Eichler-built home is an Eichler home, to sum up this correspondence. A specific example in the messages comes from a reader who spotted a window high in the wall of the home depicted in the story: "A clerestory window does not an Eichler make!!!" We'll get to clerestory windows in just a minute. The Eichler-inspired design goes back to the builder's high regard for architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Eichler and his family came to California in 1940. In 1943 he rented Hillsborough home that Wright had designed for San Francisco banker Sidney Bazett. When the Bazett owners finally sold the home, forcing Eichler to move, he took with him his family, furnishings and a love for the open-room plan of the Bazett House. "The Bazett House had a tremendous impact on Eichler and his desire to build a really different style home," according to Marty Arbunich, publisher of the Eichler Network, a newsletter for and about Eichler homeowners. "The typical things about an Eichler home are the low elevation, the flat roof and the atrium entry. Also typical are the floor-to-ceiling windows and the Philippine mahogany paneling," Arbunich said. While Wright's architectural philosophy was a design springboard, Eichler worked with other architects on the design of the homes he built. Eichler homes, designed for post-and-beam construction, were on the cutting edge for their day. They had radiant heating in the floors and, in later designs, were among the first subdivision homes to offer a three-bedroom model with two bathrooms, instead of the one-bathroom design used by many home builders. The influence from the Bazett House that remained strong in the Eichler homes, said Arbunich, is the relationship between the living space and the surrounding property. "The indoor-outdoor feel of an Eichler home is most distinctive," he said, because of the expanse of glass facing the back and side yards. Which brings us back to windows. A clerestory window is one placed in the upper part of a wall to light a lofty room or space. And because Eichler homes have floor-to-ceiling glass, you don't have clerestory windows. And those three New York Eichlers? There were built in 1962 in Spring Valley, north of New York City, in an attempt to create a subdivision of 216 homes. Easterners didn't take to low-profile designs. There's a headline in that story too. A New York City newspaper splashed this headline across the page over an article about the Eichler plan: "California Modern Invades Rockland County."