The Secret Lives of Eichler Homes

By Julie Jaskol | April 22, 2025 | Photography by Christopher Gonzalez

Eichler homes may not look like much from the street: a flat monochromatic expanse of grooved wood siding, garage doors, a carport. Perhaps a narrow ribbon of clerestory windows under a flat roof and a tasteful pop of color on the front door.

None of it hints at the drama revealed when you open the door and step into an airy atrium flooded with light, floor-to-ceiling windows revealing the open living space and green and leafy backyard beyond it.

It’s what Anthony Zorrilla loves most about his Mid-Century Modern Eichler home in Orange County, California. “The open windows, the indoor-outdoor connection – you feel like a part of nature,” he said.

Zorrilla bought his home 30 years ago from the original owner. He and his wife are designers who studied architecture. When his wife called him at work to come look at the house in the Fairhills tract of Orange, California, “We knew what Eichlers were, and we knew it was exactly what we wanted,” he said. “I came home for lunch and bought a house.”

They were lucky. The original owner had kept the house, designed by architect Claude Oakland, largely intact. “She added AC, but she was a maniac about making sure she couldn’t see the custom ducts,” he said. “She made us promise not to touch the olive tree in the front yard.”

As he stood in his driveway, he pointed to other Eichlers on the street still owned by original homebuyers or passed down to the second or third generation in the family. “That’s the kind of house it is,” he said. He looks forward to passing his Eichler along to his daughter as well.

Fairhills is one of three Eichler tracts in Orange County. Along with Fairhaven and Fairmeadow, a few miles apart, the county designated it an historic district in 2018, with protections for the nearly 350 tract houses built by Eichler Homes in the early 1960s. Owners must adhere to the Orange Eichler Design Standards (OEDS) that guide any changes to the exterior of the house, including rooflines, original features, and materials. “They won’t let you do anything crazy with your house, which I appreciate,” Zorrilla said.

Joseph Eichler wasn’t your typical tract home developer. Instead of building hundreds of look-alike homes as quickly and cheaply as possible, he worked with some of the country’s leading Modernist architects to design affordable, accessible, and remarkable homes. And in an era when discriminatory covenants sought to exclude certain homebuyers, he welcomed them without regard to race or religion.

Designed by three teams of architects that included A. Quincy Jones, Claude Oakland, Robert Anshen, Steven Allen, and Frederick Emmons, Eichler homes featured central courtyards or atria, floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors—and, innovatively, two bathrooms for a three-bedroom house. Houses were modestly sized but seemed bigger because of their open floorplans.

Some featured steeply pitched gable roofs over the courtyard and living areas, others had lower-pitched or flat roofs. Eichler preferred curving streets and cul-de-sacs to create privacy and maximize views. While many of these features seem familiar to Californians now, they were revelatory at the time.

Eichler built nearly 11,000 houses over 25 years, beginning in 1949. The vast majority were in Northern California, where Eichler and his family lived, including the fast-growing regions of San Jose, Palo Alto, and Marin County. Just 575 homes were built in Southern California, in Orange, Granada Hills, and Thousand Oaks.

Marty Arbunich was first attracted to Eichler homes when a friend bought one in Marin County in the 1980s. His friend described a tightknit community of Eichler homeowners who loved the architecture and lifestyle. “They also seemed to share another trait—the frustration of not having contractors and products available to them that understood their home and could support their home improvement needs,” Arbunich said.

Arbunich launched the Eichler Network, a home improvement support system with a quarterly newsletter that he distributed free to Eichler owners throughout California. The Network linked them to each other and to contractors specializing in Eichlers and other Mid-Century Modern homes.

He became an Eichler owner himself in 2003, acquiring the X-100, a unique all-steel experimental Eichler that is now on the National Register of Historic Places. “For me, the greatest pleasure of owning the X-100 is managing a genuine and important piece of Eichler history, and the challenge and enjoyment of faithfully maintaining it in the spirit of Joe Eichler and his architects,” he said. He documents the history of the house and its restoration at eichler-x100.com.

Adriene Biondo credits the Eichler Network with helping raise awareness among her Granada Hills neighbors about the historic importance of their homes. A longtime chair of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee, Biondo helped lead the neighborhood’s drive to become the Balboa Highlands Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, which would ensure that homes in the area would retain their character. In 2010 Balboa Highlands, the only Eichler development in Los Angeles County, became LA’s first post -World War II-era neighborhood to be designated historic.

That effort, along with house tours, the neighborhood’s own newsletter titled “The Atrium,” and a campaign to paint curbs with the Eichler logo, helped bring together another tight-knit Eichler community. “Honestly, Eichler living is such a wonderful experience that whenever we have parties or get-togethers Eichler Life is the topic of conversation,” Biondo said. “I love that even an Eichler home's eccentricities are cherished parts of Eichler ownership.”

For homeowners in Balboa Highlands, film production is one of those eccentricities. “With Mid-Century Modern's enduring popularity, our well-preserved homes, and our proximity to Hollywood, we often host film crews,” she said. “You can spot our Eichler homes in everything from music videos ("Bad Guy" by Billie Eilish) to television shows ("CSI") to movies ("Cake" starring Jennifer Aniston), and many more. Sometimes I'll get home from work and as I turn onto our street it looks like Balboa Highlands is a studio backlot with huge lights and film trucks up and down our whole block!”

Hollywood glamor aside, for Biondo and other Eichler owners it all comes down to that special Eichler quality of opening to nature. “Much of the magic of being inside an Eichler is the feeling that although you're inside...you're outside,” she said. “Throughout the day, if I'm working from home, patterns will catch my eye as the sunlight shifts. In the evening, I can look across the room through the vast window walls and watch the moon rise through the beams crisscrossing our atrium.”

Once you step inside, an Eichler seems limitless. “When we moved here in 1995, we placed my grand piano in the living room which looks out to the hills and towering pine trees,” said Biondo. “I'm so inspired by this incredible view that I always say that I feel like we live in a national park!”

The Balboa Highlands tract is among Eichler’s last successful developments. He made an unsuccessful foray into multi-family high-rises in San Francisco, hoping to revolutionize that market the same way he had changed single-family home development. The company declared bankruptcy a few years later. Eichler died in 1974.

Many of the features he pioneered—open floor plans, floor-to-ceiling windows, and sliding glass doors, for instance—have become ubiquitous in contemporary home design. And Eichler homes that once sold for around $10,000 to homebuyers with modest budgets are today sought after for hundreds of times more than that—if they come on the market at all.

Which proves the claim Eichler made for his homes in the 1960s: “Beauty is achieved by the architect’s skill in designing details, his blend of materials and proper proportions, and above all, the exercise of good taste. In short, we produce a work of art that has gained international reputation.”