Menlo Park · Menlo Oaks · 1950–1972
The whole Eichler story, in about fifty houses.
Palo Alto has the volume. Los Altos has the scarcity. Menlo Park has something neither can claim: the beginning and the end, on opposite sides of one street.
675 Evergreen Street · Stanford Gardens · sold by the Boyenga Team
01 · Why Menlo Park is different
Not a tract town. A timeline.
Eichler built roughly fifty houses in Menlo Park, and he built them across almost his entire career — from the fifth development he ever completed to a three-house court finished two decades later. Nowhere else on the Peninsula can you stand in one city and see the whole run.
In clusters of two to sixteen
The fifth development Eichler ever built
January 1950 to the early 1970s
There is no Fairmeadow here, no Fallen Leaf Park — no single subdivision to point at. Menlo Park's Eichlers sit in small groups, several of them invisible from the street, a few of them unincorporated. That is exactly why they are hard to find, hard to value, and easy to lose.
02 · The arc
1950 to the early seventies.
Five clusters, laid out in the order they were built. Read top to bottom and you are reading Eichler's career.
Stanford Gardens
Completed January 1950 — the fifth modern development Eichler ever built, and the one that introduced radiant heat to his houses. Designed with a draftsman recorded only as Castor, before the Anshen & Allen partnership began. Evergreen, Oakdell and Lemon Streets.
Oakdell Park
To market in April 1952, and unusual in carrying work from both of Eichler's founding architectural firms — Anshen & Allen and Jones & Emmons. Olive Street, Oakdell Street, Magnolia Court and Middle Court.
Peninsula Way · Menlo Oaks
The largest early Eichlers anywhere: about 2,800 square feet, five bedrooms and three baths, on half-acre to three-quarter-acre lots opposite Peninsula School. Several keep their original Thomas Church landscapes, and some still have cork floors.
A four-house group · Menlo Oaks
Four houses of about 1,600 square feet, built as a small subdivision. One survives intact. It is the clearest single illustration of what has happened to the Menlo Park stock, and most tract lists leave it out entirely.
Stanford Avenue Court
Three houses on a small court off Stanford Avenue, by Claude Oakland — the architect of the late Eichlers — built across the road from the tract Eichler had finished twenty years earlier. The bookend sits opposite the beginning.
Stanford Avenue is the detail worth pausing on. Eichler finished Stanford Gardens in January 1950 and, two decades and thousands of houses later, came back and built three more across the street. You can stand between them and see the entire evolution of the frame, the glass and the plan in a single glance.
03 · What started here
The floor that made an Eichler an Eichler.
Radiant heat — hot water run through pipes buried in the concrete slab — is the single system most associated with these houses. It is why the floors are warm, why there are no radiators or floor registers interrupting the glass, and why the ceilings could stay open and unbroken.
Eichler installed it for the first time at Stanford Gardens, in Menlo Park, in the tract completed in January 1950. Every Eichler that followed inherited it.
That matters to an owner for an unromantic reason: seventy-five years on, the original steel pipe in those first slabs is at the end of its life. A failed radiant loop is the most expensive surprise in an early Eichler, and the difference between a house with a documented repipe and one without is real money. It is the first thing we look for here and the first thing a serious buyer asks about.
We have written the whole story of that system — why Eichler adopted it, what it made architecturally possible, how it fails after seventy years and what the options are — on a separate page.
The photograph above is the argument. The beams run unbroken from the ridge out over the glass line, the glass runs floor to ceiling without a vent beneath it, and the only solid mass in the room is the fireplace. Every one of those decisions is affordable because the heat is in the floor.
04 · Valuing a cluster of twelve
There is no comparable. There is a method.
A tract of six hundred houses generates its own comparables. A cluster of twelve does not, and a cluster of two certainly does not. Menlo Park owners are routinely handed a number derived from Palo Alto Eichlers three miles away, or from non-Eichler Menlo Park houses of similar square footage. Both are wrong, and they are usually wrong in opposite directions.
What works is building the number up from the parts and then arguing it: the Peninsula Eichler price per foot established across the larger tracts, adjusted for lot — and in Menlo Oaks the lots are enormous by Eichler standards — for the condition of the frame, for the state of the slab and the radiant loop, and for how much of the original house is still there.
Then there is the part no algorithm reaches. An early Eichler in original condition is not a three-bedroom house of a certain size; it is a documented piece of the man's first years, and the buyer who wants one is not shopping on price per square foot. Establishing which kind of buyer you have is most of the work.
Valuation
Fifty houses. We price them one at a time.
Tell us the address and we will come back with a range, the comparable set we built to get there, and what we would want to check on the slab before listing.
05 · What we have sold here
675 Evergreen Street.
One of about twelve houses in Stanford Gardens — the tract Eichler completed in January 1950, his fifth, and the first with radiant heat.
06 · What is at stake
These are the ones being lost.
Eichler Network counts roughly fifty Eichlers still standing in Menlo Park, and about twenty lost since 1979. On a base that small, a third of the stock has already gone.
On 22 July 2013 the Eichler at 1798 Oakdell Drive was taken down by backhoe. It had sold the previous May for $1,420,800. There was no documentation of it beforehand; what survives is a Google Street View capture from 2011.
That house was one of the earliest Eichlers standing. Corner lots in that neighbourhood fall outside the protections that apply to the standard lots around them, which is how a house from his fifth development came down in an afternoon.
Menlo Park land is worth enough that the arithmetic often favours the teardown, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we will say is that the arithmetic is frequently done badly — against a generic buyer pool rather than the specific one that pays a premium for an intact early Eichler, and without pricing what the architecture is actually worth to that buyer. If you are weighing an offer on a house like this, it is worth having both numbers before you decide.
07 · For owners
Your drawings probably still exist.
Most Eichler owners have never seen the original plans for their own house, and assume they are gone. For a good number of them they are not — they are at UC Berkeley or UCLA, findable, and copyable for a fee.
Which archive depends on who drew the house, and that depends almost entirely on the year. It matters here more than anywhere: Oakdell Park carries work from both firms Eichler used in the fifties, and only one of those two offices left records behind.
08 · Before they list
In clusters this small, the list is the market.
There are about fifty Eichlers left in Menlo Park, spread across four clusters, and roughly twenty have been demolished since 1979. A twelve-house cluster might trade once in three years. When one does move, the buyers who want it have usually been waiting and are rarely found through a portal. Join the list and you hear when we hear — no volume, no drip campaign, and nothing sent unless something actually happens.
Every cluster, in detail
09 · If you are not selling
Most of what we do here has nothing to do with a transaction.
About fifty houses, and in a normal year very few of them change hands. If the only thing we had to offer Menlo Park Eichler owners was a valuation, we would have almost nothing to say to almost all of you.
So here is the other half of it, and none of it requires you to be selling anything.
Find your drawings
- Most owners have never seen the original plans for their own house and assume they are gone. A good number are not — they are at Berkeley or UCLA, findable and copyable.
- Which archive holds what
Settle what it is
- No public dataset flags an Eichler, and portals get it wrong in both directions. Two photographs — the living-room ceiling and the glazing line — will usually settle it.
- How to tell
Get it recorded
- 1798 Oakdell Drive came down in July 2013 and left no record but a Street View capture. Photographing and measuring a house properly costs a few hours. Not doing it costs everything.
- What has already gone
Talk to us
We have been doing this since 1996.
Eric and Janelle Boyenga have worked Silicon Valley since 1996 and were founding agents at Compass. If you own one of the fifty — or you are trying to find one — we would like to know you before you need us.