Eichler Tracts of Northern California

Green Gables is the oldest. The Eichler Network records that sixty-three Eichler homes were built there in 1950, variants of Anshen and Allen’s original Eichler model AA-1, with three bedrooms, one bath, about 1,100 square feet and no atrium; another eighty or so followed in the adjoining Edgewood area in the mid-1950s. In December 1950 Architectural Forum named it and the other early tracts subdivision of the year. Green Gables was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, listed under reference 04000863, and the Network notes that it has no homeowners association and that the listing does not in itself restrict what an owner may do.

Fairmeadow, also from 1950, is the tract with the famous plan. The Eichler Network describes a non-grid layout of interlocking circles — Jones and Emmons called it a concentric circle site plan — that eliminated through traffic, with the site plan by Anshen and Allen; Fortune used the pattern on the cover of its twenty-fifth anniversary issue in February 1955. Our Palo Alto page describes the same tract in the city context.

Greenmeadow is the most thoroughly documented of all Eichler tracts because its National Register nomination is public. Eichler Homes built it in 1954 and 1955 on about 73 acres of its own land at the southern edge of the city, bordering Mountain View: 243 single-story residences of three or four bedrooms designed by A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons, with a community center, pool and park. At the time of nomination 220 buildings were classified as contributing, and the nomination credits an active architectural review committee with reviewing all proposed remodeling plans and keeping the vast majority of houses true to the original design. It was listed in 2005 under reference 04000862. The nomination’s description of the houses — slab-on-grade post-and-beam, radiant heat standard, galley kitchen behind a six-foot screen wall, Philippine mahogany veneer paneling, two-by-eight tongue-and-groove redwood deck as ceiling — is the clearest primary account of what an Eichler kitchen sits inside.

City-wide, the Palo Alto Daily Post reported at the time of the council vote that Eichlers make up roughly 2,700 of the city’s single-family houses and that single-story overlay districts overlap eleven Eichler tracts. On April 2, 2018 the City Council approved Eichler neighborhood design guidelines by a vote of seven to one, as voluntary; they address roof slopes, front and garage doors, materials and second-story additions. Our Palo Alto page lists the other tracts — Royal Manor, Charleston Meadow, Los Arboles, Channing Park — and the permit path.

Terra Linda was Eichler’s first subdivision in Marin County. The Pacific Coast Architecture Database records that Joseph L. Eichler built 630 houses in the Terra Linda tract during 1955–1956 and 1959–1961, one-story homes of three or four bedrooms to plans by either Anshen and Allen or Jones and Emmons, at Del Ganado Road and Las Raposas Road, with houses lining Las Colindas Road, Las Ovejas Avenue, Montecillo Road, Bamboo Terrace, Penny Royal Lane, Pine Lane and Barberry Lane. The Eichler Network, writing about the valley west of Highway 101 and north of the Marin County Civic Center, counts nearly 850 Eichler homes nestled against its hills, with Terra Linda North at approximately 630, and notes that Manuel T. Freitas sold 400 acres to developers in 1953. The two figures count different areas rather than contradicting one another. Terra Linda is inside the City of San Rafael, so kitchen permits come from the city; our San Rafael page covers the neighborhood.

Lucas Valley, to the north, is the tonier Eichler neighborhood in the Network’s phrase, and it is unincorporated. The Network describes a 538-home neighborhood built in the mid-1960s next to a dairy farm, in a subdivision called Upper Lucas Valley with Miller Creek on its southern boundary and hills to the north, where Eichler ensured that views of the hills would be unimpeded and all utility lines are buried. Residents organized early for fire protection, and the Lucas Valley Homeowners Association’s still-active architectural review committee is credited with preserving the neighborhood’s character. That review concerns the exterior and the tract; interior cabinetry is normally the owner’s decision, and building permits come from Marin County rather than the City of San Rafael. Our Lucas Valley page is devoted to the tract, and the houses there — atrium plans, mahogany paneling, radiant slabs — are the ones most people picture when they hear the name.

In 1955 Eichler expanded to Sacramento, the first time the company had built outside the Bay Area; his son Ned, the sales manager, had advised against it, and later said the company never sold the houses very well there. The Eichler Network records about sixty homes built in 1955 and 1956 on three streets — South Land Park Drive, Fordham Way and Oakridge Way, about five miles south of downtown — to Jones & Emmons plans JE-80, 83, 84, 85 and 89, with three or four bedrooms and original prices of $17,750 to $21,000. Early buyers remembered neighbors unused to all that glass and flat roofs. The City of Sacramento’s district plan gives the formal count: Eichler Homes, in partnership with Moss & Moss, completed 59 homes in the South Land Park Hills Unit No. 7 development, of an intended 143.

On May 21, 2024 the City adopted a historic district plan for the tract. The South Land Park Hills (Eichler) Historic District is a cohesive grouping of 48 residential buildings in a Mid-Century Modern style with California Ranch influences, all built by Eichler between 1955 and 1956, with a period of significance of those two years. The plan describes the construction — post and beam on a concrete slab, radiant heating and much of the plumbing embedded in the slab, flat or nearly flat roofs with little or no attic space — and sets objective standards for exterior change. It also lists the project types typically exempt from design review, and the first item on that list is any interior improvement. For a kitchen in one of the contributing houses, the historic district is therefore a fact to know and not a process to go through, unless the work touches the primary facade, the cladding or the post-and-beam elements the plan protects. Our Sacramento page and our Land Park page cover the city and the neighborhood.

Across all ten tracts the kitchen facts are the same because the construction is the same: a slab with the heating and much of the plumbing in it, a beam line that sets cabinet height, glass where the uppers would go, and a plan that puts the kitchen on view. What differs by tract is which architect’s model the house is — an Anshen & Allen AA-1 in Green Gables is a smaller, simpler plan than a Jones & Emmons JE-series house in Greenmeadow or South Land Park — and which office issues the permit. Both are settled at the first site visit, and neither is settled by reading about the tract.