2055 Ticonderoga Drive · San Mateo Highlands

One house, and the ridge it sits on.

Most of what is written about this tract is written from sources. This page is the other half — a single-storey flat-top Eichler photographed properly, and the neighbourhood itself from a few hundred feet up, where the argument the drawings make becomes something you can just look at.

Subject: 2055 Ticonderoga Drive, San Mateo Highlands
Type: Single-storey flat-top, post-and-beam, slab on grade
Photographed: September 2025
Credit: Boyenga Team photography
Aerials: Looking west to Crystal Springs Reservoir and the SFPUC Peninsula Watershed; east to the bay

The street face.

Eichler's street elevations are famously undemonstrative, and this one is a good example of why the usual identification advice fails here. There is no front step, because there is no raised floor — the house sits on a slab. The roof is a low folded plane rather than a true flat. And the glazing that the architecture is known for is all on the other side.

The Eichler at dusk from the street, its low roof folding over a recessed central entry, with a ginkgo tree and a gravel and boulder garden in front. — Plate 1 **Dusk, from the kerb** — The recessed entry slot in the middle is the whole composition: the roof carries straight across and the front door is set back in shadow behind it. Note the two cladding treatments meeting at the entry — vertical board on the left wing, textured block on the right.

The house seen straight on from across the cul-de-sac, showing a long low roofline, paired garage doors and mature conifers behind. — Plate 2 **Straight on** — The full width of the elevation. Two garage doors at the right, the entry slot at centre-left, and the roof running the entire length without a break.

The house from the corner of the cul-de-sac, with a cedar to the right and the neighbourhood rising behind. — Plate 3 **From the corner** — A corner lot, which is why the elevation reads so long. The redwood fence at right marks where the private side of the plan begins.

A three-quarter daylight view of the entry, showing the carport-style recess, the exposed beam ends under the eave and a gravel forecourt. — Plate 4 **The entry, in daylight** — Look at the eave: the beams run out past the wall line and stop in the open air. That is the post-and-beam frame declaring itself, and it is the single most reliable thing to look for on an Eichler street elevation — more reliable than the roof pitch, which varies across this tract.

Inside, the frame is the finish.

The thing that surprises people on a first visit is that nothing is hidden. The structure is the ceiling. The beams you saw outside are the same beams crossing the room, and the tongue-and-groove decking between them is the roof from underneath.

A living room with a grey-painted brick fireplace at right, exposed beams in a white tongue-and-groove ceiling, and an olive-green dining wall beyond with glass to the garden. — Plate 5 **Living into dining** — One volume, divided by a fireplace mass rather than by a wall. The ceiling decking runs continuously across both rooms, which is what makes the space read as one thing.

A wide view of the living room with a white-painted brick fireplace, a red brick edge visible at left, and full-height glass looking onto a pine. — Plate 6 **The fireplace** — Painted white inside, left in red brick outside — the same chimney mass, read two different ways. Plate 11 shows the outside of it.

From the kitchen counter, looking through the living room to a wall of sliding glass opening onto a rear deck and garden. — Plate 7 **Kitchen to garden** — The sightline that sells these houses. Counter, living room, glass wall, deck, garden — no door and no corridor anywhere in it.

A galley kitchen with white counters and cabinets, a black tap, a skylight overhead and a long counter that becomes a breakfast bar. — Plate 8 **The galley** — A skylight rather than a window, because there is no exterior wall to put one in — the kitchen sits in the middle of the plan. The counter runs out to become the breakfast bar in the next room, which is the original Eichler move.

Dusk, and the side you were meant to see.

An Eichler photographs badly from the street and beautifully from the garden, and that is not an accident of the lens. The plan turns its back on the road and opens everything — living room, bedrooms, kitchen sightline — onto private outdoor space.

The entry at dusk with downlights washing the wall, the roof plane lit from beneath and a lavender and orange sky behind. — Plate 9 **The entry, lit** — With the soffit lit, the depth of the entry recess finally reads. In daylight it is a shadow; at night it is a room.

A rear patio at dusk with modern outdoor seating, the house glowing from inside through two sliding glass walls, one to a bedroom and one to the living room. — Plate 10 **The rear patio** — Two rooms open onto the same paved court — a bedroom at left and the living room at right. Every pane you can see here is on the private side of the house.

The side elevation at dusk, dominated by a red brick chimney mass, with glass walls either side of it and an aggregate terrace in front. — Plate 11 **The chimney** — The only piece of decoration on the building, and it is not decoration — it is the flue, left honest in red brick while everything around it is block and glass.

And the tract from above.

These four frames do more for the argument on this site than anything we could write. The Highlands is a hillside tract with a protected watershed on one side and the bay plain on the other, and from the air you can see exactly why that shapes everything — the roof plane of the whole neighbourhood, the reservoir, and the hard edge where building stops.

An aerial at dusk over the Highlands showing flat-roofed Eichlers on curving streets, with Crystal Springs Reservoir and an undeveloped ridge under heavy cloud beyond. — Plate 12 **West, at dusk** — Crystal Springs Reservoir and the SFPUC Peninsula Watershed — 23,000 acres that will not be developed. The 1950s brochure promised “spectacular vistas of the sparkling blue Crystal Springs Lakes.” It was not overselling.

A daylight aerial over the Highlands with the reservoir and hills beyond, showing block after block of low flat-roofed houses. — Plate 13 **The roof plane** — Count the flat roofs. This is what “the largest single Eichler tract ever built” means in practice — not a street of them, a whole hillside.

A wide daylight aerial showing the full extent of the tract running up to the reservoir and the watershed hills. — Plate 14 **The edge** — You can see the tract stop. Everything past that line is watershed, which is why this neighbourhood has never been surrounded.

A daylight aerial looking east from above the Highlands across the tract toward hills, suburbs and San Francisco Bay in the far distance. — Plate 15 **East, toward the bay** — The other direction: down the ridge, across San Mateo, and out to the bay. About four miles that way and four hundred feet down is 19th Avenue Park, Eichler's other San Mateo tract — flat, earlier, and inside the city limits.

An aerial at dusk showing the cul-de-sac and the subject house in context, with the neighbourhood and hills stretching away under a pink and grey sky. — Plate 16 **The cul-de-sac** — 2055 Ticonderoga at centre, on its corner. Note the second storeys visible elsewhere in frame — around sixty homes here have added one, because nothing in this tract prevents it.

And a house on the edge.

1796 Lexington Avenue sits on the western boundary of the tract, which in the Highlands means something specific: the houses stop, the watershed starts, and there is a road between them. It is also a useful corrective to the idea that an Eichler is a flat box — this one has a low shed roof in wood shakes, and it is unmistakably an Eichler.

An aerial looking north along Lexington Avenue with flat-roofed Eichlers packed along the right-hand side and an unbroken sweep of open grassland on the left running down to Crystal Springs Reservoir and the wooded ridge beyond. — Plate 17 **The edge, from above** — Houses one side, watershed the other. Highway 92 crosses in the distance and the reservoir sits behind it. Note the solar arrays and the varied roof treatments on the Eichlers — nine years of building and sixty of alteration, read from the air.

The rear elevation of an Eichler: a low shed roof in wood shakes with deep eaves, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, a navy-painted concrete-block chimney mass carrying a terracotta flue, and a concrete patio with modern seating. — Plate 18 **The garden elevation** — Start with the roof, because it is the thing most identification guides get wrong here. This is a low shed in wood shakes, not a flat top — and the house is still an Eichler in every other respect: post-and-beam, slab on grade, the frame exposed under the eave, and an entire wall of glass facing the private side.

The side and rear of the house seen past a very large Monterey cypress, with a red-stained fence marking the property line and open meadow immediately beyond it. — Plate 19 **Where the lot ends** — The fence is the boundary of the tract. Past it is watershed land, which is why the cypress has been allowed to become the size it is.

The full rear elevation with the shed roof running left to right, glass walls, the navy block chimney mass and patio furniture on a wide concrete terrace. — Plate 20 **Two planes and a clerestory** — The roof is in two planes at slightly different heights with a band of glass between them — a standard Eichler move for getting light deep into a plan whose street face has almost no windows.

A concrete patio with cushioned seating beside a wall of sliding glass, looking across a low stone retaining wall to a wide meadow and wooded hills. — Plate 21 **The back garden is a hillside** — A stone retaining wall, a strip of lawn, and then several hundred acres that belong to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. This is what the 1959 brochure was promising when it advertised land “unspoiled by man” — and it is the only Eichler tract where the promise still literally holds.

The patio from under the cypress, looking along the glass wall of the house to the right and out over the meadow and hills to the left. — Plate 22 **Two rooms of outdoor space** — A paved terrace against the glass and a lawn beyond it, with the borrowed landscape doing the work a fence usually has to do.

A view along the glass wall toward the navy chimney mass, with the cypress overhead and the meadow visible both through the house and beside it. — Plate 23 **Through and past** — From this angle you can see straight through the house to the meadow on the far side. There is no solid wall anywhere in that sightline except the chimney.

A living room with a white tiled fireplace, a white-painted tongue-and-groove ceiling with exposed beams, oak floors, and full-height glass looking onto a meadow with wooded hills beyond. — Plate 24 **The room the boundary buys** — The Eichler idea was always glass to a private garden. Here the garden is a meadow and the hills behind it are permanent, so the room simply opens onto them. Same house type, completely different proposition.

A living and dining space with a glazed corner, exposed beams overhead and a sliding wall open to the patio and meadow. — Plate 25 **Glass at the corner** — No post in the corner, because the beam above it is doing the work.

A wide view from the kitchen counter across the living room to the dining area, with the beamed ceiling running the full length and glass on two sides. — Plate 26 **One volume** — Kitchen, living and dining are a single space divided only by the fireplace mass. The ceiling decking runs unbroken from one end to the other.

A dining area with a gallery wall of abstract art, a linear pendant over the table, and a sliding glass door to the patio and meadow. — Plate 27 **Dining, to the garden** — The slider is the room's fourth wall.

The other tract.

Down on the bay plain, four miles east and four hundred feet lower, 19th Avenue Park was finished two years before the Highlands started. 637 Vanessa Drive is a good example of it — a low gable with a deep overhang, a clerestory band under the ridge, and a teal panel over the garage doing all the colour work.

A 19th Avenue Park Eichler at sunset: a low gabled roof with deep overhangs, dark blue vertical board siding, a teal panel above twin garage doors carrying the number 637, and clerestory glass under the ridge. — Plate 28 **637 Vanessa Drive** — Smaller than a Highlands house and on a smaller lot, but the moves are the same: the roof does the composing, the glass is kept for the other side, and one band of colour carries the whole elevation.

A living room with a white concrete-block fireplace at its centre, exposed beams in a white tongue-and-groove ceiling, and sliding glass walls opening to outdoor space on both sides. — Plate 29 **Glass on both sides** — A block fireplace stands free in the middle of the room with sliding glass to outdoor space either side of it.

A galley kitchen with white cabinets, dark counters, a stainless island hood, globe pendants and a white-painted beamed ceiling running the length of the house. — Plate 30 **The galley** — The same post-and-beam frame as the Highlands, in a noticeably smaller house.

A rear patio of concrete pavers with a dining table, enclosed by the L of the house with a white concrete-block chimney mass and walls of sliding glass. — Plate 31 **The L around the patio** — Every room on this side of the plan is glass to the same paved court.

An oblique aerial over 19th Avenue Park: block after block of low flat-roofed Eichler homes on a flat bay plain, with hills in the far distance. — Plate 32 **The tract from above** — Flat ground, small lots, tight spacing, a consistent low roof plane — and no watershed anywhere. Put this beside Plate 17 and the whole argument of this site is in two photographs.

And one more house, on Lexington.

Everything above is a production Eichler — the thing this tract is actually made of. The X-100 on Lexington Avenue is the opposite: one house, framed in steel, built to be looked at rather than sold, and now the only Eichler-related National Register listing in the county. It has its own page, and its own photographs.

An interior planted garden under a skylight inside the X-100, framed by orange-painted steel columns with a black cone fireplace at its centre. — The X-100 **A garden in the middle of the house** — which is what a steel frame buys you.

The X-100 at dusk from across its pool, the entire glazed wall lit from within. — The X-100 **From the water** — the complete file, the 1956 plan and thirteen more plates →
Photography by **Sabrina Huang**.

Illustrations · AI-generated, not photographs

What the streets look like, drawn rather than shot.

These six images are computer-generated illustrations — not photographs of any real address, and not of any house we have listed. We use them to show the range of colour, fencing and front-garden treatment you see driving the Highlands today, in frames we could not have shot without standing in six people's driveways. Every one is labelled.

AI-generated illustration of a white Eichler with a flat roof, clerestory windows over a double garage, and a horizontal redwood entry fence, with a wooded ridge behind. — AI-generated illustration **White, with clerestory** — the band of glass above the garage is the Highlands tell: it lights the entry without giving the street a view in. The horizontal redwood screen is a modern treatment of an original idea.

AI-generated illustration of a charcoal-stained Eichler with vertical siding, a yellow front door and a yellow-painted fascia band, behind a mature street tree. — AI-generated illustration **Charcoal and a yellow door** — the most-copied Eichler colour scheme on the Peninsula, and it works because the siding is dark enough to make the white fascia read as a line rather than a mass.

AI-generated illustration of an olive-green Eichler whose front elevation opens into a glazed entry court with exposed posts and beams, set behind a drought-tolerant front garden. — AI-generated illustration **Open to the street** — the post-and-beam entry court glazed on both sides. This is the plan type the Brandywine brochure called “open-to-the-sky,” seen from the kerb. On the atrium →

AI-generated illustration of a cream Eichler with a deep flat-roof overhang on exposed beams, a weathered board fence screening the entry court and a single wide garage door. — AI-generated illustration **The overhang doing its job** — that depth is not styling. The Yorktown brochure sells it as shade control: out in summer, in during winter. The brochure text →

AI-generated illustration of a grey Eichler on a sloping Highlands street, with a yellow spandrel panel above the garage, a yellow front door and a wooded hillside rising behind. — AI-generated illustration **On the slope** — note the ground rising directly behind the roof. That is the Highlands condition, and it is why so many houses here sit on stepped pads. The tract →

AI-generated illustration of a sage-green Highlands house with a low hipped roof and a raised-panel garage door, behind a deep drought-tolerant front garden. — AI-generated illustration **And the useful counter-example** — look at the roof. It hips down on all four sides. An Eichler roof does not: it is flat, or it is a single gable, or it is a butterfly. Put this frame beside the five above and you have the fastest visual test there is. Is it an Eichler? →

Disclosure. The six images in this section are AI-generated illustrations, created for the Boyenga Team. They are not photographs, they do not depict any specific property, and they should not be relied on as a record of any house, lot or streetscape. Everything above this section is a real photograph.

The two X-100 frames above are photographed by Sabrina Huang and reproduced with permission. All other photography on this page is the Boyenga Team's own, of 2055 Ticonderoga Drive and of the San Mateo Highlands from the air, made in September 2025. Skies in the dusk frames are composited, which is standard practice in architectural and listing photography; the buildings, landscape and light are not. Nothing here is retouched to remove or add built features.

Talk to us

This is how we photograph a listing.

Sunset exteriors, drone context that shows what the neighbourhood actually is, and interiors lit so the frame reads. If you are selling an Eichler here, the photography is not a line item — it is most of the marketing.