How can I tell if a Burlingame house is a real Eichler?

Check the roofline, the entry and the glass. Eichler houses in Mills Estate present a near-blind front elevation with a flat or folded-plate roof, a wide flat fascia, post-and-beam framing with exposed beams inside, floor-to-ceiling glass at the rear, a slab floor with no crawl space, and a carport or flat-roofed garage integrated under the same roofline. A pitched or hipped roof, a prominent front-facing window with a gable above it, or a raised floor with foundation vents means it is not an Eichler.

Are all the houses on the Burlingame Eichler streets Eichlers?

No. Eichler bought lots within the existing Mills Estate subdivision rather than laying out his own streets, so on most of the eight streets Eichler and conventional 1950s houses stand next to each other. Mariposa Drive and Mariposa Court are described in the sources as entirely Eichler, which we have not verified parcel by parcel.

Kerbside identification

On most of these streets, the house next door is not one.

This is the practical difference between Burlingame and the big tracts. In Greenmeadow or Fairglen the whole street reads Eichler from the corner. Here Eichler bought lots inside an existing 1954 subdivision, so you are identifying individual houses inside a conventional street.

The one-second test

Look at the roof against the sky. If the line is horizontal — flat, or a shallow zigzag — keep looking. If there is a ridge, a gable end, or a hip sloping four ways, stop. Eichler did not build those.

A taupe Eichler in Burlingame, with a flat roof, a continuous clerestory band the full width of the front, a glazed gable rising over the centre, and a two-car garage. — **The gable as an event.** Everything here is horizontal: the fascia, the clerestory band, the garage doors, the kerb. Then one gable lifts over the centre and is glazed on its end, so it reads as light rather than as mass. Take the gable away and this is a plain flat-roofed Eichler. That is the point — the whole composition is one interruption in a level line.

A taupe flat-roofed Eichler in Burlingame with a continuous clerestory band, a red front door and a three-car garage. — **The baseline.** No gable, no shed, no drama — a level roof, a clerestory band, a blind wall and a red door. Most of the tract looks more like this than like the photographs above, and it is worth seeing so the special ones read as special. The clerestory is doing all the work.

Eight things to check

In order of how quickly they settle it.

Check	Eichler	Its 1950s neighbour
1. Roofline	Dead flat, or a shallow folded plate — a zigzag of straight planes, no ridge beam in the usual sense.	Pitched, hipped or cross-gabled. A ridge you can point at.
2. Fascia	A single wide flat board running the full length, no eave brackets, no gutters breaking the line.	Overhanging eaves with visible rafter tails or a boxed soffit.
3. The front	Nearly blind. Siding, a solid front door, small or no street-facing windows. The house turns its back on you deliberately.	A picture window facing the street, and a front door you can see from the car.
4. Floor level	Slab on grade. The floor meets the ground. No foundation vents, no crawl space, no step up to a raised porch.	Raised floor with foundation vents along the base of the wall, and two or three steps to the door.
5. Garage or carport	Under the same flat roof plane as the house, reading as one mass.	A separate gabled volume, often projecting forward with its own roof.
6. Glass	Floor-to-ceiling at the rear and into any atrium — invisible from the street, which is the whole idea.	Conventional punched windows with sills and headers, front and back.
7. Beams, from inside	Exposed beams continuing straight through from inside to outside, and a ceiling that is the underside of the roof.	Flat drywall ceiling with an attic above it.
8. Heating	Radiant tubing in the slab. No floor or wall registers anywhere in the original rooms.	Forced air, with registers in the floor or ceiling.

Checks 1 to 5 work from the kerb without going onto the property. Checks 6 to 8 need the door opened. Please do the first five from the street and the last three by invitation.

Three that fool people

The traps, in this tract particularly.

A flat roof is not enough. Burlingame's hillside has plenty of contemporary and 1960s builder houses with flat or low-slope roofs that are not Eichlers. The flat roof is necessary, not sufficient — you still need the blind front, the slab, and the beams.

A remodelled Eichler can look like nothing. A dropped ceiling, a filled-in glass wall, a new pitched roof over the old flat one, and an enclosed entry court will hide the house almost completely from the street. If the floor is a slab, the plan is post-and-beam, and it dates to 1964–65 on one of the eight streets, it is worth a second look however it presents. These are the houses that trade below what they should.

“Eichler-style” is a real category and it is not this. Other builders worked in the idiom across the Peninsula, and some did it well. The distinction that matters for value is whether Eichler built it with his architects — here, Claude Oakland, with Jones & Emmons attributable to at least one house.

And the honest caveat: nobody has published a parcel list for this tract, so there is no register to check an address against. Everything above is how you read the house itself. Why no list exists →

Before you decide

If you can answer yes to the roof, the slab and the beams, you almost certainly have one.

Those three are structural. They are expensive to fake and expensive to remove, so they survive remodelling in a way that doors, windows and kerb appeal do not.

The rest of the checklist is confirmation. Roof, slab, beams — and a 1964–65 build date on one of the eight streets — is the combination that does not occur by accident in Burlingame.

What we cannot do is tell you from a photograph of the front, which is the request we get most often. The front elevation of an Eichler is the least informative face of the building. That was the point of it.

What is actually in one of these houses → · The tract →

Talk to us

Send us the address.

We will tell you what we can establish and, just as importantly, what we cannot. If it turns out to be a well-disguised original, that is worth knowing before anyone prices it.