Boyenga Team · Burlingame Eichlers What's mine worth?
A pale blue-grey Eichler in Burlingame with a shed roof rising to the right, a continuous clerestory glazing band under exposed beams, a deep overhang and a three-car garage, with the hills visible behind it.

Mills Estate · Burlingame 94010

One tract. About a hundred houses. The late, large ones.

Burlingame has exactly one Eichler neighbourhood, and it is not the one most people mean when they say “Peninsula Eichler.” Mills Estate sits on a ridge in the north-west of the city, sold from late 1963, and the houses are two thousand square feet and up — four and five bedrooms, at the end of Eichler's run rather than the beginning.

See the houses The tract The steel prototype What's mine worth?

Mills Estate, Burlingame · photographed from the public street

Read the corrections page first

Almost everything written online about Burlingame Eichlers traces to a single paragraph of marketing copy, repeated across a dozen sites — including two of our own. Two of its claims we could not find in any archive, journal or record. What we found, and what we got wrong →

A taupe Eichler in Burlingame, with a steep gabled entry canopy over a glazed entry court, a second gable visible through the glass, and an olive tree in the foreground.
The double gable. Look through the glass: there is a second gable inside the first. The outer roof lifts over a glazed entry court and the inner one covers the house itself, so the front door stands in a lit room that is technically outdoors. This is the late Eichler argument in one elevation — privacy at eye level, daylight above it — and it is the reason these houses do not read as 1950s tract modern.
~100 Eichlers, all in Mills Estate. Widely repeated, never counted from parcel records. Why we hedge it.
1963 Sales opened late in the year. Claude Oakland's drawings are dated 1963; the houses were finished 1964–65.
2,135–2,440 Square feet, from houses we could verify individually. Not the “1,900–2,300” figure in circulation.
8 Streets carrying Eichlers. Two of them — Mariposa Drive and Mariposa Court — are said to be nothing else.
0 Historic districts, single-storey overlays or HOAs found. Burlingame reviews design city-wide instead.

The houses themselves

Eight elevations, one tract.

All eighteen photographs →
The asymmetric gable — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
The asymmetric gable. Two slopes, different lengths, beam ends projecting straight through and stopping in mid-air.
The roof that folds twice — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
The roof that folds twice. Up to a peak, down, up to a second peak, down again — as close to a folded plate as anything standing here.
The warm register — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
The warm register. Same gabled entry as the pale houses, read entirely differently because the body is stained rather than painted.
A carport open at both ends — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
Straight through the house. The carport runs clean through the house and the far end is planted, so you look past the building into the garden.
Two storeys — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
Two storeys. Nothing in the published record on this tract mentions two-storey models. This photograph is evidence, not decoration.
The painted fascia — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
The painted fascia. Every other house here keeps the roof edge quiet. This one paints it turquoise, beam ends and all.
Olive-green board-and-batten — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
Original siding, original mass. Vertical board-and-batten, and an olive-green body that has never been talked into grey.
Sixty years of tree — a Mills Estate Eichler in Burlingame, photographed from the public street.
Sixty years of tree. A crape myrtle this size is not landscaping. It is the age of the tract, standing in the front garden.

Every photograph on this site is our own, taken from the public street. House numbers are given where legible; street names are not asserted, because we have not confirmed them. The eight streets →

Why this tract is different

Eichler arrived here last, and built biggest.

Most Peninsula Eichler tracts are 1950s work: a thousand to eighteen hundred square feet, three bedrooms, flat roof, on land Eichler subdivided himself. Mills Estate is none of those things.

By 1963 Joseph Eichler had been building for fourteen years, Claude Oakland had taken over the drawing board, and the houses had grown. What went up on this ridge was the late product: four and five bedrooms, over two thousand square feet, with roof forms that had gone from flat to gabled to genuinely theatrical. One Burlingame design carried a folded-plate roofline over the entry — a zigzag, folded like paper, spanning on its own geometry.

And Eichler did not lay out this land. Paul Trousdale had already subdivided it in 1954, on the old Darius Ogden Mills estate, after the forty-two-room mansion burned. Eichler bought lots inside somebody else's subdivision and put a hundred modern houses on them, a decade later.

What a late Eichler actually is →  The Mills estate before the Eichlers →

Consider, for example, the design found in Burlingame with a lively, folded plate roofline over the entry.

Dave Weinstein, Eichler Network, on late Eichler models. As far as we can establish, that sentence is the entire documented basis for the folded-plate roof in this tract. We took it seriously and went looking →

Largest verified

2,440

sq ft — 1775 Hunt Drive, built 1965, 4 bed / 2.5 bath

A 1950 Eichler

1,044

sq ft — the AA-1 prototype, Sunnyvale, 3 bed / 1 bath

The man who opened it

Eichler's sales manager built himself a house here and never left.

Jonas Harschel opened Mills Estate for Eichler Homes. He was Dutch, Jewish, and had got out of Holland in April 1940, weeks before the invasion. Sixty of his family and friends did not.

In 1960 he left a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year insurance career to sell houses, and he was explicit about why: “I detested my colleagues' attitudes on social and political issues.” He went to work for the one builder in California who would sell to anyone.

His own house was 8 Mariposa Court — Jones & Emmons, 2,135 square feet, five bedrooms. He lived in it from 1964 until his death in 2007. His widow Cora stayed until 2021. When it finally came to market it was the first time that house had ever been sold.

The whole story →

This is not incidental colour. It is the reason the tract exists in the form it does, and it connects Burlingame directly to the thing that makes Eichler matter beyond architecture.

Four years before Mills Estate opened, Eichler resigned from the San Francisco home builders' association because it would not adopt a non-discrimination position. Four years after it opened, T. Jack Foster Jr. brought Eichler into Foster City and said the quiet part out loud: “With one stroke, by bringing Eichler into Foster City we effectively announced to the world that no one would be denied the opportunity to own a home in Foster City because of race.”

Mills Estate sits in the middle of that decade, sold by a man who had watched what the alternative leads to. The Foster City comparison →

Three tracts, one county

Burlingame, the Highlands, Foster City.

San Mateo County holds three Eichler concentrations that could hardly be less alike — in size, in ground, in era and in what governs them. If you are choosing between them, this is the table that matters.

Mills Estate, BurlingameThe Highlands, San MateoFoster City
Homes~100~650–700+~200–235
Built1963–65mid-1950s–19641963–68
GroundRidge, hillside lotsRidge at 469 ftEngineered fill, ~8 ft above sea level
Typical size2,135–2,440 sq ft~1,800–2,200 sq ft~1,940–2,000 sq ft
ArchitectsClaude Oakland; Jones & EmmonsAnshen & Allen; Jones & Emmons; Claude OaklandClaude Oakland; John Brooks Boyd
GovernmentCity of BurlingameUnincorporated countyCity of Foster City
What governs changesCity design reviewCounty — no overlay, no guidelinesCity planning permit on almost every exterior change — rules in transition
HOANone foundNoneNone on the Eichlers

Every figure here is sourced and dated on the comparison page, including the ones where sources disagree and we print both.

Start here

The file, in order.

The tract

Mills Estate

What was built, when, how big, and the boundary nobody has published.

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1946–1951

The horseshoe

Burlingame annexed a hundred-foot strip in the shape of a U around seven hundred acres it did not take. Millbrae sued. It went to the Court of Appeal. This is why these houses are in Burlingame.

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1860–1954

Before Eichler

Darius Ogden Mills, fifteen hundred acres, a dairy, a forty-two-room house that burned, and the Los Angeles developer who cut it into lots.

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Architecture

The late Eichler

What changed between 1950 and 1964: size, roofs, the atrium, the panelling, and the building code that ended the mahogany.

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1917–2007

Jonas Harschel

Fled Holland in 1940. Sold Eichlers because of what he had seen. Lived at 8 Mariposa Court for forty-three years.

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1956 · one of one

The X-100

Eichler built about eleven thousand houses in wood and exactly one in steel. It cost $125,000, sold nothing, drew a hundred and fifty thousand people, and is on the National Register.

Read →

Working paper

Corrections

The claims we could not verify, the ones we have had wrong on our own sites, and the source we will not cite.

Read →

Talk to us

What is a Mills Estate Eichler worth?

About a hundred houses means a handful of sales a year, so the honest answer is never a portal estimate — it is a cohort, a date and an adjustment you can see. Tell us the street and we will show you the working.