Joe Eichler's Kevo

EICHLER UPDATE
REMODEL: Helping a midcentury classic fit a 21st century style of living
- Mary Jo Bowling, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, August 26, 2006

In the late 1950s a developer named Joseph Eichler had an idea that was unusual for its time: He wanted to build modern homes for the masses.

He hired well-known architects to help him create single-story, flat-roofed, outdoor-embracing homes in the Bay Area suburbs and beyond. The buildings had features that had never been seen outside custom-built homes, and they came to be identified with the California indoor-outdoor lifestyle.

These houses were built into the early 1970s, and they continue to impart lessons for modern living, including planning space efficiently, using industrial or common materials creatively, and making affordable houses for the masses.

When Tim and Gaynor Brown and their two teenage girls moved to Palo Alto from the United Kingdom for the second time, they knew they wanted to buy an Eichler home. On their first stint in the United States they had rented one and fell in love with the style.

"We were very keen to find a house that reflected our desire to live in a contemporary environment and made the most of the wonderful climate," Tim said.

They found those qualities in a 1973 Eichler, and set about remodeling it with the help of Doug Thornley of Baum Thornley Architects of San Francisco. Although Thornley had never lived in an Eichler, the architect considers Joseph Eichler to be an "enlightened developer who worked with great architects to bring good design to the masses."

He was asked to remodel the house for the family without compromising its original design. "Although these were not expensive houses when first built, they were well considered by the architects who designed them. The flow of space works well and, of course, the light is wonderful," said Tim. "(The house) was 30 years old, and so it obviously needed some updating."

The Browns wanted to make the biggest changes in the kitchen. The family loves to cook together and wanted to make it a little larger and more sociable. Plus, it was showing its age. "In Eichler's time, kitchens were more of a work space and less of a social space," said Thornley. "(And) the kitchen's finishes and appliances were worn and long overdue for a remodel."

The original area was divided into three rooms: a small galley-style kitchen, a breakfast area and a pantry. To make room for gatherings, Thornley kept the pantry and made the kitchen and breakfast area into one space. He relocated an interior and exterior door to improve the room's circulation pattern. A new bank of cabinets was installed to transform an L-shaped galley kitchen into a U-shaped work space with an island in the middle. A new, super-size, translucent (its center is Lumicore, a see-through commercial acrylic material), barnlike door separates the kitchen from the living area when it's closed.

A hallmark of an Eichler house is the connection to the outdoors via walls of glass and sliding glass doors. Nodding to that tradition, Thornley installed a wall of floating cabinets over a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows and kept the large sliders that open up onto the patio.

"Natural light comes in through the windows above and below the cabinets," said Thornley. "All of the cabinets are on legs to make the kitchen seem as open and airy as possible."

Opposite the window wall, cabinets run nearly to the ceiling to make room for more storage. The family has a lot of small appliances -- of a number and type Eichler surely never dreamed of -- and most of them are housed here, behind a stainless-steel appliance garage. The stainless-steel door is jointed and works like an old-fashioned roll-top desk. Deep drawers beneath the garage hold more appliances and large pots and pans.

The cabinets themselves are a walnut veneer over plywood. "We noticed that the family was buying classic Eames chairs, which have a veneer over plywood," said Thornley. "These cabinets have that spirit."

The sleek cabinets are topped by three kinds of countertop material for three purposes. The countertop by the sink is stainless steel for dirty work and wet prep; the island countertop is made of both limestone for baking activity and wood for chopping work.

At the end of the island is a stainless-steel table on casters, a spot where kids can do homework or the family can have an informal meal. "The fact that it's on casters makes it flexible," said Thornley. "They can roll it through the sliding doors and use it as a buffet on the patio."

The smooth, polished floor in the kitchen and the rest of the house makes it easy for the rolling table to move around. It's a self-leveling, engineered concrete material called Ardex, a commercial product often used in retail stores. It's proved to be a great conduit for radiant heat, another feature most Eichlers have. It warms the floors by heating water in thin pipes beneath the floors.

"Radiant heat is a clean and efficient heating system," said Thornley. "This system was in great shape and we didn't have to do anything to repair it."

The family loves the new room. "(It's) a much larger working space," said Tim. "Living room, dining area, and kitchen are really one big space with minimal dividing walls and sliding screens. I love the sense of scale this creates. It is a bit like living in an urban loft. We can be cooking but still talk to people in the main living room or hold a party and have everyone move through the space instead of being trapped in the kitchen."

A bank of elevated walnut-veneer cabinets appears again in the living area. "The family needed an office area and more storage space," said Thornley. "One of the cabinets opens up to make a desk area."

The rest of the house remains much the same with one very notable exception: the color palette. Eichler developed a strict color palette for his homes, but these colors are from a line of wallpaper created by another famous modernist: Le Corbusier.

"Tim had some sample books of the wallpaper and we matched the warm grays and dark reds from that," said Thornley. "The family likes color, and these colors seem to fit."

The finishes (new tile and maple veneer cabinets) and fixtures (vessel sinks, faucets, showerhead) in the master bathroom are new, but the layout of the room is essentially the same -- including the sunken, built-in tub common to many Eichlers. "It may look unusual at first, but it makes perfect sense," Gaynor said. "It stops water from splashing out."

The house is approximately 2,200 square feet. If you measure that against many new houses built on the Peninsula, that's small. "I must confess that I do get basement envy," Gaynor said. "But, overall, we have plenty of space."

Her husband agrees, saying that the home has made the family more tight-knit and that the access to the outdoors makes the small house seem larger.

"We spend more time together than we might if we had a series of disconnected rooms to retreat to. Our daughters have their own spaces, and they spend plenty of time in those. But I think we are all more aware of what each of us is doing. It allows us to communicate better," Tim said. "We move a lot between inside and outside, which is one of the main benefits of living in an Eichler. It's almost as though we have a series of outside rooms to complement the inside ones."

Of course, we can't know what Joseph Eichler would think about the remodel, but Thornley is willing to venture a guess. "I think he would be shocked at how much kitchen remodels cost these days," he said. "But I think he would be thrilled that the house still functions as it was designed."

Bring modern architecture to the masses? Was this a crazy idea or a stroke of genius? Frank Lloyd Wright designed a Usonian House but it never got off the ground.

“By the mid-1940s, Joseph Eichler had become intrigued by modernist design and in particular one of the creations of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who had designed the Bazett house (Hillsborough, California), a rented home for Eichler during World War II.

Triggered by Wright's inspiration, Eichler began to fashion a vision short on home-building acumen, yet long on modernist aesthetics and his own iron will. Beginning in 1949, when it was still uncommon to find merchant builders engaged with architects, Eichler became engrossed with building communities of homes characterized by both flair and affordability.”

One of this smartest moves was choosing great architects of the day to help him. Eichler recruited the San Francisco firm of Anshen & Allen, then Jones & Emmons (A. Quincy Jones), later Claude Oakland.

Post and beam mid century moderns started to be built with indoor-outdoor living, walls of glass, atriums, and radiant-heat floors which were copper pipes filled with hot water.

Eichler was also know to be very charming and a man of high character and wonderful humor. He avoided potential shortcuts that would compromise his vision of bringing quality modern architecture to the masses at affordable prices. "By making construction easier and less costly," added Ned, "the architectural principles my father had come to hold dear would have been violated."

A strong proponent of fair housing and deeply opposed to racial discrimination, the liberal Eichler was the first large, tract builder to sell to minorities, and even built a home on his own lot for an NAACP leader. Joe resigned from the National Association of Home Builders in 1958 in protest of racial discrimination policies and, according to reports from long-time Eichler owners, offered to buy back homes from those who had trouble accepting their neighbors.

"If, as you claim, this will destroy property values," Joe once told some disgruntled Eichler owners, "I could lose millions...You should be ashamed of yourselves for wasting your time and mine with such pettiness."

Eichler Homes, Inc. built nearly 11,000 single-family homes in California. Eichlers can be found in Marin county, the East Bay, San Mateo county, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento. Three small communities of Eichlers in Southern California stand in Orange, Thousand Oaks, and Granada Hills. In addition, there are three Eichler-built residences in New York state.

Eichler was an architectural pioneer and him homes are more popular today then ever. Joe Eichler died in 1974 at age 73.
His legacy is of a tenacious visionary that took the necessary action to get around the roadblocks and even his own shortcomings. "Before and even after 1947," recalled Joe's son, Ned Eichler, "my father never held a hammer, a saw, or a wrench in his hand. Still, he became a master builder."

Check out these sites:
www.eichlernetwork.com
www.eichlerlife.com