Eichler built his own house in Atherton, and almost nothing else.

Palo Alto has thousands of Eichlers. Foster City has two hundred. Atherton has a handful, scattered among estate houses of every period on lots of an acre and more, and the reason there are so few is not that Eichler overlooked the town. He lived here. He tried to build here. And he stopped.

What remains is the most important single house in the entire Eichler story, a development that was advertised and then abandoned, and a town whose own code leaves almost all of them unprotected. This site is about all three.

Anshen & Allen designed it in 1951: a V-shaped plan in redwood and brick, opened to the garden, its rooms and even its swimming pool worked on a parallelogram. Joe and Lillian Eichler lived in it until 1965, longer than any other house they occupied, and used it to test what went into the tracts — sliding doors, built-in televisions, fabrics, floors.

The Feder family bought it in 1965 and kept it for fifty-nine years. In March 2024 the Boyenga Team listed it at $6,385,000, and sold it.

From 1943 to 1945 Eichler rented Wright’s Bazett House in Hillsborough, a Usonian laid out on a hexagonal module at sixty degrees. He loved it enough that the next owners had to serve him notice to get him out. He credited it with turning him into a builder of modern houses.

When he came to build his own, he took the Bazett’s V and its angled discipline, and Anshen & Allen expressed it in parallelograms.

In 1953 Eichler advertised four designs in Lindenwood, three and four bedrooms, at $42,500 to $49,500 — the most expensive Eichlers on the Peninsula. He built a handful — on Linden Avenue, on Hawthorne Drive, across the street from his own house — and then he stopped. The sources count anywhere from four to about a dozen.

One of them was Plan 37: a four-bedroom house on 1.85 acres at 73 Hawthorne Drive, built around one of Eichler’s earliest atriums. It was demolished after a sale in the mid-1970s, as was the one across from 19 Irving, in 2015. Half a mile north, on Encina and Placitas, a second small cluster followed in 1959–60.

Robert Anshen persuaded Eichler to hire architects at all. The firm he founded with Steve Allen designed the first Eichler tracts — including University Gardens in Palo Alto, at $9,400 a house — and set the rule that still defines an Eichler street: “wherever possible the building would be blank to the front.”

The town zones for one house per acre on level ground and lets each grow to a set share of its lot. Apply the code to 19 Irving’s 39,123 square feet and it would allow about 7,100 square feet of house. There are 3,700.

That unbuilt half is the pressure every Atherton Eichler lives under. It is also exactly what a preservation buyer chooses not to use.

An Atherton Eichler comes up once in years. When one does, the buyer who gets it is almost always the one already known to the seller’s agent. Join the list and you hear when we hear — nothing sent unless something actually happens.

Eichler built roughly eleven thousand houses, and they do not price the same from one town to the next. Atherton has fewer than twenty. Menlo Park, next door, has about fifty across several clusters. Palo Alto has thousands.