Off the Beaten Tract : 30 Years After First Eichler Homes Were Built in O.C., Folks Still Either Love or Hate the Outside-In Architectural Style

They don’t look at all like the surrounding ranch-style houses from the same time period: The view from the curb is of thin, low-peaked roofs and long, flat, wood facades with a glaring lack of front-facing windows.

The unconventional exteriors give proof to the builder’s comment that people either love the homes or hate them, with no middle ground.

But what’s behind those exteriors has made architectural icons of these homes built in the 1960s by Joseph L. Eichler. There are 350 Eichler homes in Orange County, clustered in three pockets of development--two in Orange and one near Tustin.

These tract homes that don’t look like tract homes have, over the years, built a devoted following and, 30 years later, still stand as testimony to innovation in a world of mass production.

Eichler sought, and achieved, a style that blended the outside and the inside into one unbroken space.

The homes of other post-World War II builders cut space into a series of closed, box-like rooms. Eichler used soaring ceilings in the living areas, interior atriums, skylights and exposed beams that extend through the glass walls to the outdoors. The exterior paneling becomes the interior paneling on a living room wall--and both are stained the same color so only the glass marks the change from inside to out.

Eichler, a Palo Alto-based developer, believed that homes with custom features and modern design principles could be built without losing the cost-savings of mass production. He established himself in Northern California before deciding to bring his ideas to Southern California in the early 1960s.

Eichler, who believed in the design principles espoused by Frank Lloyd Wright, hired two teams of noted modern California architects: the Los Angeles firm Jones & Emmons and the San Francisco firm Anshen & Allen. Heading one team was A. Quincy Jones, who worked with Eichler for 24 years, until the builder’s death in 1974. Jones later headed USC’s School of Architecture and Fine Arts.

The architects designed for Eichler what remain the only tract homes in the nation that use post-and-beam construction. The technique of carrying most of the weight of the house on enormous beams that run the width of the structure enabled the houses, behind their plain-wrap facades, to have walls of floor-to-ceiling glass.

The flat facades were an effort by Eichler and his architects to orient the houses away from the street and toward the enclosed atriums and the rear yards. The aim was a home with open rooms--a floor plan that some find inhibiting and others find relaxing.

To the architecture, builder and designers added technology.

The homes used the most modern paints and stains, metal windows, built-in appliances, Formica counters and kitchen cabinetry available. Many of the homes also sported radiant heating systems--gas-heated water pipes buried in the concrete slabs: a boon in the cheap energy ‘60s, a bane to today’s Eichler owners.

Eichler homes historically sold at 5% to 10% higher than those in nearby conventional tracts.

When new, the Orange County homes sold from the mid $20,000s to the low $30,000s and offered buyers 2,100 to 2,700 square feet of living space when the atriums were included.

In today’s recessionary market, buyers can get an Eichler for $200,000 in the Taft-Cambridge tract. On the high end, an Eichler in the Santiago Canyon Road tract currently is listed at $274,000.

Eichlers homes are far more common in Northern California. The company built 10,000 of them there in the 1950s and 1960s. In Orange County, there are just the three small tracts plus one custom “Eichler on an Acre” that the builder constructed in Orange Park Acres during a lull in his tract development.

When an Eichler-built home is put up for sale nowadays, prospective buyers still have one of two strong reactions, said Stefanie Raffel, an Orange realtor who specializes in them.

“People will stop at the front door. They either turn around and walk out or they take a deep breath and gasp, ‘Oh, Wow!’ ”

Those who fall in love with an Eichler just aren’t happy with anything else, she said. One potential buyer looked for three years before finding the exact model he wanted, she said. He went to every open house and followed all the newspaper ads until he finally found the right floor plan with the right exposure, and a kitchen revamped in just the right way.

Raffel said that the homes tend to stay on the market for a while because they are so different. Architects and artists, especially, are drawn to Eichler houses, she said. And most new Eichler owners quickly become passionate about their homes.

“Eichler owners like to ask each other about their first impressions about their Eichlers, when they saw them for the first time. To them, it’s kind of like asking ‘Where were you when JFK was shot?’ ” Raffel said.

Joseph Woollett, an Orange architect, first saw Eichler houses in Palo Alto when he was at Stanford University in the late 1950s. Woollett and his wife, Diane, have owned two of the builder’s homes, both in Orange, and have never lived in any other developer’s house.

They bought their first Eichler, in the tract off Taft Avenue and Cambridge Street, in 1962, shortly after they married. Their only move, to a larger Eichler off Santiago Canyon Road in the hills of eastern Orange, was in 1971.

Ask them a question about Eichler or his philosophy and one of the Woolletts starts talking, knowledgeably and passionately, while the other searches through a collection of yellowing newspaper and magazine articles, and even original Eichler sales brochures from the 1960s, to find just the right piece of information.

Although they have made a few changes, the Woolletts still have the original kitchen cabinets with sliding, removable doors, the Philippine mahogany paneling and the ‘60s hanging globe light fixtures that came with the house. The eaves--which can be seen from the inside--are stained the same color as the ceiling.

“What we learned about architecture when I was in school is portrayed in these houses,” said Woollett, pointing out that the floor-to-ceiling glass has no molding at the ceiling and seems to disappear into it. Like ceiling and eaves, inside and outside walls separated only by glass are stained identically. Even the concrete walkways come inside, with exposed aggregate flooring in the entryway.

The reason: Eichler and his architects worked to “blur the distinction between inside and outside.” In contrast, today’s tract home architecture is concerned with “inside the box” and “outside the box,” Woollett said.

When someone remodels an Eichler and adds wallpaper or paints a wall a different color from what can be seen outside, “They blow it,” Woollett believes. “They just lost what it’s all about.”

But after 30 years, many people have made changes in the houses.

Most often, Woollett said, homeowners redo the kitchen. Others raise the roof lines of the homes a foot or so to add air conditioning (some houses in the Fairhaven tract near Tustin, the first of Eichler’s Orange County developments, came with air conditioning), or push the walls out to make the master bedroom bigger.

As evidence of people’s desire for change, there are now modified Eichlers with interiors that sport Southwestern and Euro-modern looks. Some have even put Victorian chairs in an Eichler.

While some owners prefer the undisturbed Eichler design, others have looked upon the home as a blank canvas on which to to put their personal stamp.

Among the original owners of an Eichler who have changed it over the years is Orange City Councilwoman Joanne Coontz. She says that she and her husband have tried to make the changes carefully, without destroying the lines of the house.

Coontz bought the house in the Taft Avenue tract in 1961 on a GI loan at 5.25% interest and not much down, she said. The houses were described as “experimental” by the FHA, she remembered.

“Men really are the ones who pick these houses out, but I’ve enjoyed it,” said Coontz.

Over the years, the Coontzes have covered the open-to-the-sky atrium because the house faces south and gets so much sun. They’ve added windows under an extended gable and pushed the back wall of the house out six feet to enlarge the kitchen and two bedrooms.

The kitchen cabinets--which came coated with something called “Zolotone plastic paint” inside and out--have been replaced with oak. It was a conscious departure from the “stark, 1960s look where everything was utilitarian,” Coontz said.

As for wallpaper, which purist Woollett disdains: “I have it everywhere,” Coontz said.

Like other Eichler owners, though, Coontz is addicted to the open design.

“It would be difficult to live anywhere else now because of the openness. It’s a little hard to get used to at first but you really do have privacy.”

Over the years, the custom homes designed by the architecture firms Eichler worked with became laboratories for ideas that often were incorporated into the Eichler tracts.

A. Quincy Jones, who died in 1979, was known as an environmentally sensitive architect whose work included Walter Annenberg’s estate in Palm Springs, a number of well-known Los Angeles homes, university buildings at UCLA and USC, a variety of office complexes and factories and the entire Cal State Dominguez Hills campus.

“What’s important about Eichler, and other enlightened builders, is that he was willing to stay with a premise, a design idea,” said Elaine K. S. Jones, A. Quincy’s widow.

“Some builders are just market-driven. They find out what somebody already has and feels good about,” and that’s what they build. “They are not trying to break new ground,” she said.

When built, the modern Eichler homes won design awards from architects, builders and national magazines. Life magazine did several photo layouts on the homes, dubbing one “House of Many Patios,” and another, “Handsome Four-Bedroom Builder House.”

Eichler’s motto was to offer “the most house for the money” and his homes came with such items as dishwashers, multipurpose rooms, extra storage and fencing.

Eichler even helped change the American homemaker’s daily routine.

With the kitchen open to the dining area and the rear of the house--a design feature today’s builders have rediscovered with a vengeance--it was possible to be in the kitchen cooking and still keep an eye on the children. And when entertaining, the cooks weren’t closed off in the kitchen.

Because of the unique design-as-a-statement-of-philosophy embodied in the Eichler homes, owners tend to keep them.

Elaine Jones said she knows of people who have been living in their Eichlers since the mid-’50s. Jones herself lives in the Santa Monica Boulevard home her husband created in 1965 when he gutted the interior of a commercial photography studio. It has many of the same elements as a Jones-designed Eichler.

As much as they are appreciated by those who live in them, Eichler homes are not without drawbacks.

Although the open traffic circulation plan is great for entertaining, Diane Woollett says the oh-so-visible back yard must be cleaned as well as the house before guests come over.

Some Eichler owners no longer use their radiant heating systems because they heat the whole house, with no temperature variations from room to room. And the heat that warmed the floors so nicely when the children were young is expensive today. It’s also hard to find parts when things wear out in an Eichler. And because the flat roofs have no attics or crawl spaces, the houses are difficult to air condition.

But these problems are usually taken in stride. Would committed Eichler owners live anywhere else?

The Woolletts smile and shake their heads.

“To go from these houses to a conventional house would be too claustrophobic,” Joe Woollett said.