San Mateo Eichlers / The unbuilt Arrow
1961 · Northern Highlands · Never built
The Arrow.
There is a set of Eichler designs for this tract that no one has ever lived in. In 1961, Eichler brought in Aaron Green — described by Eichler Network as Frank Lloyd Wright's leading and most talented follower — to solve the northern Highlands, where the slopes defeated the standard plans. Green drew models called the Arrow. Around the office they were called the frying pan. Not one was built.
- Architect
- Aaron Green
- Year
- 1961
- For
- The steep slopes of the northern Highlands
- Model name
- The "Arrow"
- Informally
- "The frying pan"
- Built
- None
- Reason
- Not established. Eichler Network: "It's not clear why the homes were never built — maybe the cost."
- Sourcing
- Single-sourced to Eichler Network's Highlands history
Why we bother with a house that doesn't exist
It is the third time the hill won.
Read the Highlands as a nine-year argument between a production method and a landform and the unbuilt Arrow stops being trivia.
Eichler's system was a flat slab. The ridge kept producing lots it could not sit on. In 1958 the answer was Belluschi going vertical on a narrow sloped lot — one house, never offered as a plan. In 1961 the answer was supposed to be Aaron Green, an architect whose whole formation under Wright was about building with a site rather than levelling it, drawing a repeatable steep-slope model. That is the interesting one, and it never happened. In 1965 the answer was Claude Oakland going two-storey on seven specific lots on Yorktown Road, and that one shipped.
So the northern Highlands slopes that Green was hired to unlock either stayed unbuilt, got built conventionally, or got built by somebody else. Which of those, we do not know.
Where the drawings would be
If the Arrow drawings survive, the likeliest homes for them are Aaron Green's own professional papers, or Eichler Homes records held by researchers and collectors around the Eichler Network. We have not located them, and we are not going to imply we have. It is on our open list, alongside the UCLA holding of A. Quincy Jones's papers, which a forum contributor reports contains a folder labelled "Eichler homes / with breathtaking views in the Highlands. San Mateo."
Everything on this page traces to one article: Eichler Network's history of the San Mateo Highlands. It is a strong source — it is the institutional archive of the subject — but it is one source, and no other publication we found mentions Green's involvement here at all.
We are publishing it because it is a real and genuinely unknown piece of this tract's history, and because burying single-sourced material is how it gets lost. If you know more — or have seen the drawings — we would very much like to hear from you.
It's not clear why the homes were never built — maybe the cost.
Talk to us
Do you know something we don't?
Original brochures, plan sets, purchase paperwork, photographs of the tract under construction, or anything at all about the Arrow — we will credit it, we will cite it properly, and we will tell you what we think it is.