Joseph Eichler

Joseph Leopold Eichler (June 25, 1900 – July 1, 1974) was a 20th-century post-war American real estate developer known for developing distinctive residential subdivisions of Mid-century modern style tract housing in California.

He was one of the influential advocates of bringing modern architecture from custom residences and large corporate buildings to general public availability.

His company and developments remain in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles.

Joseph Leopold Eichler was born on June 25, 1900, in New York City, and raised around Sutton Place, Manhattan, where his father and mother ran a small toy store, and in The Bronx.

His father was Austrian and his mother was German, and he was raised traditional Jewish.

Eichler attended New York University (NYU) and earned a business degree.

In 1925, the Eichler family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, in order to work in the Moncharsh family wholesale butter and egg business Nye and Nisson, Inc, which closed by the mid-1940s.

Nye & Nissen was found, by the government, to be selling eggs that were outdated or incorrectly graded.

Abe Moncharsh, Joe's brother-in-law, served six months to a year in jail.

By 1943, and until 1946, Joe's Peninsula Farmyard, a retail store, in Burlingame, California, specialized in poultry and eggs.

In 1943, Eichler rented the Sidney Bazett House in Hillsborough, California, a Usonian-style home built by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Living in the Bazett home inspired Eichler to become a residential real estate developer of Modernist homes.

Between 1949 and 1966, Joseph Eichler's company, Eichler Homes, built more than 11,000 homes in nine communities in Northern California and homes in three communities in Southern California.

Later, other firms worked with Eichler's company to build similar houses.

Together, they all came to be known as Eichlers.

During this period, Eichler became one of the nation's most influential builders of modern homes.

He hired the respected architect and Wright disciple of sorts Robert Anshen of Anshen & Allen to design the initial Eichlers, and the first prototypes were built in 1949.

In later years, Eichler built homes that were designed by other architects including by the San Francisco firm Claude Oakland & Associates and the Los Angeles firms of Jones & Emmons, A. Quincy Jones, and Raphael Soriano.

Eichler homes are examples of Modernist architecture that has come to be known as "California Modern", and typically feature glass walls, post-and-beam construction, and open floorplans in a style indebted to Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.

Eichler home exteriors featured flat and/or low-sloping A-framed roofs, vertical 2-inch pattern wood siding, and spartan facades with clean geometric lines.

One of Eichler's signature concepts was to "bring the outside in", achieved via skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows with glass transoms looking out on protected and private outdoor rooms, patios, atriums, gardens, and swimming pools.

Also of note is that most Eichler homes feature few, if any, front-facing (i.e., street-facing) windows; instead house fronts have either small, ceiling-level windows or small, rectangular windows with frosted glass.

Many other architectural designs have large windows on all front-facing rooms.

The interiors had numerous unorthodox and innovative features for the time period including: exposed post-and-beam construction; tongue and groove decking for the ceilings following the roofline; concrete slab floors with integral radiant heating; lauan (Philippine mahogany) paneling; sliding doors for rooms, closets, and cabinets; and typically a second bathroom located in the master bedroom.

Later models introduced the distinctive Eichler entry atriums, an open-air, enclosed entrance foyer designed to further advance the concept of integrating outdoor and indoor spaces.

Eichler homes were airy and modern in comparison to most of the mass-produced, middle-class, postwar homes built in the 1950s.

At first, potential home buyers, many of whom were war-weary ex-servicemen and women seeking convention rather than innovation, were resistant to the innovative homes.

The Northern California Eichler Homes are predominantly in San Francisco, Marin County, Sacramento, the East Bay towns of Walnut Creek, Castro Valley, Concord, Oakland, and the San Francisco Peninsula towns of San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and San Jose.

The Southern California Eichler Homes developments are in Thousand Oaks, Granada Hills, Orange and Palm Springs.

Joseph Eichler also built semi-custom designs for individual clients by commission.

The largest contiguous Eichler Homes development is "The Highlands" in San Mateo, built between 1956 and 1964.

Joseph Eichler was a social visionary who commissioned designs primarily for middle-class Americans.

One of his stated aims was to construct inclusive and diverse planned communities, ideally featuring integrated parks and community centers.

Eichler established a non-discrimination policy and offered homes for sale to anyone of any religion or race.

In 1958, he resigned from the National Association of Home Builders when they refused to support a non-discrimination policy.

According to his son, Eichler was inspired by a short period of time when the family lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed home in Hillsborough.

Eichler was attracted to the style and decided to try to produce similar designs.

Joseph Eichler used well-known architects to design both the site plans and the homes themselves.

There are also three Eichlers built as the first houses of an aborted tract in the mid-1960s in Chestnut Ridge, New York.

As a result of soaring land prices in the mid-1960s urban redevelopment projects became popular, and Eichler began building low- and high-rise projects in San Francisco's Western Addition and Visitacion Valley, San Francisco districts, a luxury high-rise, the Summit (a.k.a. the Eichler Summit) on Russian Hill and row houses on Diamond Heights.