San Mateo Eichlers / The eight two-storeys
All on Yorktown Road · 1958 and 1965
Eight. Not "a handful."
Every general source describes the Highlands' original two-storey Eichlers as "a handful" or "clusters." One source counts them, and it is the one that would know — Marty Arbunich, who restored the X-100 and directs Eichler Network. The number is eight, and they are all on one street.
Belluschi
1
The Life House, 1651 Yorktown Road, 1958
Claude Oakland
7
1965, east side of Yorktown Road
Original total
8
Out of 650–700+ homes
Added later
~55–60
Full, partial or attic second storeys. Not originals.
New · from a brochure we own
And now we have the drawings, and the asking prices.
The seven Claude Oakland two-storeys were built from two published plans. We found both in our own copy of the Yorktown brochure, pencil-dated December 1965 by whoever worked the sales office — with the prices written on them in ballpoint.
| Plan | Rooms | How it is arranged | Asking, Dec 1965 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SM-3 | 3 bed, 2½ bath | Bedrooms and two balconies upstairs, looking down into a double-height living room. Kitchen, living and dining, garage and entry court below. | $39,750 |
| SM-4 | 4 bed, 2 bath, multi-purpose room | Inverted. Living, dining, kitchen, multi-purpose room and a deck are all on the upper floor, where the view is. Two bedrooms, the garage and the foyer are below. | $41,500 base |
Both sheets are signed “Claude Oakland, Architect, A.I.A.” The SM-4 also carries the word “Model” in the same hand, which means one of the seven was the demonstration house buyers walked through.
The inversion on the SM-4 is the whole argument for these houses in one drawing. On a flat Santa Clara lot you put the living space at grade and the bedrooms beside it. On a Highlands ridge lot you put the living space upstairs, because that is the floor with the reservoir out of the window.
The prices are worth sitting with. Late-1950s Highlands Eichlers sold between $17,950 and $21,950. By December 1965 the two-storeys were being asked $39,750 and $41,500 — not quite double, in seven years, for what was still a tract house from the same builder on the same hill.
They were the most expensive thing Eichler sold here, and they still are. What they trade for now →
Why they exist at all
Because the lots left no choice.
Eichler's whole production method was a single-storey house on a slab. Post-and-beam frame, radiant tube in the pour, no basement, no crawlspace, no front step. It is fast, it is cheap, and it only works on ground that is more or less flat.
The Highlands is a ridge. On the steepest and most awkward parcels — the ones with grades too severe, or lots too small or too oddly shaped — the standard approach simply would not fit. The reason recorded for the two-storey designs is exactly that: lot limitations made a single-storey house impractical or unfeasible.
So the eight two-storeys are not a stylistic experiment. They are the tract's topography showing through the production system, and that is what makes them interesting.
What it means if you are buying one
An original two-storey here is genuinely scarce — on the order of one per cent of the tract — and it is a different product from a single-storey with a second storey bolted on later. Two things follow. First, the comparables are almost never like-for-like, because there are not enough of them; a two-storey should be valued against the single-storey market with an explicit, defended adjustment, not against whatever other two-storey happened to trade. Second, the ones on the east side of Yorktown were designed for their specific lots, which is precisely why they should be read on the ground rather than off a floor plan.
And if you are looking at an addition
The Highlands has roughly fifty-five to sixty homes with an added second storey, depending on whose count you take and how attic conversions are treated. That is a substantial share of the tract, and it is possible because nothing here prevents it: no single-storey overlay, no design guidelines, no historic district, and CC&Rs that have not been used for architectural control in at least thirty years. A neighbourhood survey floated a 14-foot height limitation and it did not gain enough momentum to go anywhere.
For a buyer that cuts both ways. It is why you can add up here when you could not in parts of Palo Alto — and it is why the house next door can too.
It comes from one detailed forum post by Marty Arbunich on the Eichler Network site, which also gives the reason (lot limitations) and locates the seven on the east side of Yorktown Road.
It is corroborated only in general terms: Wikipedia says "a handful of original two-story Eichlers," and Eichler Network's own tract article refers to original two-storey clusters. Nobody else publishes a count.
We think it is the best figure available anywhere and we publish it as such. It is a single-sourced precise number, which is a different thing from a confirmed one. The individual addresses of the seven are [not published anywhere we could find] — they are on our list to establish from County records.
- The one from 1958
- Pietro Belluschi's Life House at 1651 Yorktown Road. Four levels, 13-foot glass, low-pitched gable.
- The seven from 1965
- Claude Oakland & Associates, east side of Yorktown Road. The same year as the Yorktown brochure — plans SM-3, SM-4 and SM-54.
- Also on the tour
- A rare 1965 Claude Oakland two-storey was opened on the May 2017 Pure Tour of ten Highlands homes.
Talk to us
Rare houses need a different valuation argument.
Eight originals in a tract of six or seven hundred means there is no clean comp set. Pricing one — or defending an appraisal on one — takes a stated method rather than a search radius. That is the part we are good at.