When Diane and Bob Reklis bought their Eichler home in Palo Alto’s Palo Verde neighborhood in 1979, they weren’t necessarily looking to be part of one of America’s great experiments in residential design and social progress.
Parents of three daughters, they wanted to live in a family-friendly neighborhood, near Bob’s job at Lockheed. But they were drawn to the Eichler brand of stylish, affordable modernist homes. They especially loved the open layout, with floor-to-ceiling glass doors that opened onto the side and back yards, encouraging that California concept of year-round indoor-outdoor living.
“When the kids got roller blades for Christmas, and it was raining, we could let them rollerblade up and down the halls, because there were no carpets. It was great for families,” Diane Reklis said.
The pair are among a very special and enthusiastic group of Bay Area homeowners. They live in what have become known simply as “Eichlers” — the sleek, single-story tract homes that could be the setting for an episode of “Mad Men.” From the late 1940s to the 1960s, pioneering developer Joseph Eichler and his company mass-produced nearly 11,000 of these Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired residences in the Bay Area and other parts of California to support a booming post-World War II population.
In the Bay Area, there are Eichlers everywhere, usually clustered together in San Jose, Contra Costa County, the Peninsula and Marin County.
The backyard of Swati Kapoor’s Eichler home in Palo Alto, Calif., on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Among Eichler owners, there are a fair number of designers, artists and other creative types. Palo Verde, for example, was home to engineer Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse, while Steve Jobs grew up near Eichler homes in Mountain View and once said their “clean and simple” design inspired his vision for the first Apple products.
It’s easy to get Eichler homeowners talking about their homes and neighborhoods. From the street, the classic Eichler neighborhood is a tableau of individually varied flat- and sloped-roof homes that present a certain American ideal of visual harmony and community.
“It’s a caring, caring neighborhood,” said Soo-Ling Chang, a jewelry designer who has lived in her art-filled Palo Verde home for 53 years. She recalls that her home was a hub for kids when she was a stay-at-home mom to her two sons. These days, she appreciates the block parties organized by neighbors like Katie Renati and the way they all share fruit picked from each other’s trees or help when a new family moves in or has a baby.
Homeowner Soo-Ling Chan talks during an interview at her Eichler home in Palo Alto, Calif., on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Chang also says the “diversity and inclusion are wonderful,” with neighbors of different races and nationalities harkening back to the way Eichler introduced the concept of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) to the American suburbs decades before the term existed. As the son of Jewish immigrants, Eichler, who died in 1974, sympathized with society’s underprivileged, his son Ned Eichler wrote in The Mercury News in 1993. That’s why he began selling homes to Black families in the 1950s and fought for integrated neighborhoods when it wasn’t popular for a prominent American businessmen to do so.
Grant Reiling, a former architect who designed schools and museums, spent three years looking for the right Eichler to buy in Walnut Creek’s Rancho San Miguel neighborhood in 2010. A big selling point for the home he chose was the mahogany wood paneling and other original features.
“As soon as I walked in the door, I thought, this is it,” he said. Even during a recent upgrade, when he replaced the original radiant heating in the concrete floors, Reiling has leaned into the Eichler aesthetic with vintage exterior colors, a Le Corbusier chaise lounge and other furnishings that are evocative of early-to-mid-20th-century styles.
Grant Reiling, a retired architect, talks about his Eichler home during an interview in Walnut Creek, Calif., on Tuesday, April 15, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Similarly, the Reklises have kept much of their four-bedroom home’s original dark-wood panelling. But they’ve filled their living room and main hallway with shelves of beloved books as well as antiques, 19th-century family heirlooms and models of old sailing ships that Bob likes to build.
The hallway of Grant Reiling’s Eichler home in Walnut Creek, Calif., on Tuesday, April 15, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The first Eichler-branded tract went up in Sunnyvale in 1949. Each home, selling for $9,500, featured three bedrooms, one bathroom, redwood siding, open interiors and radiant floor heating. Over the years, the designs for each new subdivision were modified or expanded to include different roof lines, more bathrooms or even a central outdoor atrium. Eichler and his architects “were always experimenting and getting feedback from the people who lived in homes,” said Dave Weinstein, Eichler expert and former features edi-
tor at CA-Modern magazine.
Homeowner Katie Renati talks about her Eichler home in Palo Alto, Calif., during an interview on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Though Eichler himself had no architectural training, he had an innate love of design, especially for modernist architecture, according to his son Ned, who died in 2014. Eichler and his wife moved out to “liberal, cosmopolitan” San Francisco in the 1920s so he could work in her family’s wholesale food business – “a job he hated,” his son wrote in The Mercury News. After their two children were born, he insisted the family live in a rented Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hillsborough before and during the war.
After Eicher embarked on his second career as a master builder in 1947, he worked with architects like Bob Anshen, Quincy Jones, Frederick Emmons and Claude Oakland, who shared his love for Wright’s modernism and his view that America’s new neighborhoods should advance social goals, Weinstein said.
Paul Adamson, an East Bay architect, preservation advocate and author of “Eichler: Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream,” noted that modernism developed in Europe to provide quality housing for the working class. Translated to the United States, that meant building affordable homes so that G.I.s returning from World War II and their families could access the American dream of home ownership.
Eichler’s architects also introduced innovations to suburban planning to encourage neighborly interactions. Streets were not laid out in grids, but in curves and cul-de-sacs that were amenable to pedestrians, kids’ games and block parties. Many Eichler neighborhoods also were built with community parks, clubhouses and swimming pools, serving as California versions of the New England “village green,” Adamson said.
Sean Giffen is a second-generation Eichler homeowner in Palo Alto’s Greenmeadow neighborhood. He raised his five children in his late parents’ home, which is next door to the Eichler-designed community center and swimming pool. His mother and other moms once ran a preschool in the community center while he was at the pool most days, especially in the summer.
“It was awesome growing up here,” said Griffen, while “All summer long, we went to the pool every day, and we swam on the swim team. And, you know, our parents didn’t have a worry in the world about what we were up to.”
A Buddha statue in the backyard is seen in Swati Kapoor’s Eichler home in Palo Alto, Calif., on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
For a time around the ’80s, Eichlers stopped being cool, written off as small, outdated, even shabby, according to Weinstein. But as thought leaders like Jobs began to sing their praises, so too did a new generation of home buyers who wouldn’t think of drastically altering their look and didn’t mind zoning in some areas that prevent second stories. These days, a well-maintained Eichler in a desirable Bay Area neighborhood can sell for several million dollars or more.
Swati Kapoor said she and her husband Shekhar could have chosen a bigger house than their 1,700-square-foot Eichler when they moved to Palo Alto in 2011. But during their home search in Palo Verde with their son Shaan, then 5, they found a block party in full swing. They also realized that the house, especially with its huge yard, would be more than sufficient.
“Our son, he was the one who came into the house and said, ‘I love it, I love it,’” Kapoor said.