What streets have Eichlers in Burlingame?

Eight are named in the sources: Alcazar Drive, Atwater Drive, Hunt Drive, Mariposa Drive, Mariposa Court, Capistrano Way, Dolores Way and Frontera Way. Mariposa Drive and Mariposa Court are described as the only two built entirely of Eichlers, which we have not been able to verify parcel by parcel. A ninth street, Montecito Way, appears in one source we do not consider reliable.

Is Mills Estate in Burlingame or unincorporated county?

The Eichler streets are inside the City of Burlingame, ZIP 94010. This matters because Burlingame Hills — a genuinely unincorporated community adjacent to Hillsborough — is a different place, and at least one Eichler reference site files Mills Estate under that name. They are not the same neighbourhood and they do not share schools.

The tract

Mills Estate.

About a hundred Eichlers on the ridge in north-west Burlingame, above Trousdale Drive and below Interstate 280, with the bay to the east. Sold from late 1963, finished across 1964 and 1965. It is the only Eichler tract in Burlingame and there is no second one.

The honest state of the record

This tract is thinly documented. There is no published boundary, no parcel-verified count, no surviving sales brochure we could find, and no period advertising. What exists is two architect's drawings in a university archive, one magazine article, a handful of county records, and a great deal of copied marketing text. This page separates those.

A taupe Eichler in Burlingame, with a steep gabled entry canopy over a glazed entry court, a second gable visible through the glass, and a flat roof running off to both sides. — **The double gable.** Look through the glass: there is a **second gable inside the first**. The outer roof lifts over a glazed entry court, the inner one covers the house behind it, and the flat roof runs away level on both sides. This is the late Claude Oakland vocabulary doing the thing it was invented for — making a front door out of a wall that is otherwise deliberately blind.

A grey Eichler in Burlingame, with a shed roof rising to the right, a clerestory band, a coral-painted front door beside a stacked-stone wall, a paver-and-gravel path, and a mid-century apartment building visible on the ridge above. — **Look past the house.** Those are apartments **on the ridge above**, which is the clearest single image on this site of what Mills Estate actually is: a hillside subdivision with development stacked up the slope behind it. Down at the house: a **coral door** against a stacked-stone wall, and a clerestory band running the full width under the lifted roof.

SCHEMATIC, NOT A SURVEY. THE EIGHT STREET NAMES ARE AS THE SOURCES GIVE THEM; THE BLOCKS SHOW GROUPING AND APPROXIMATE RELATION TO THE RIDGE AND THE BAY, NOT LOT LINES, BLOCK SHAPES OR A RECORDED TRACT BOUNDARY. NO PUBLISHED SOURCE GIVES A DEFINED BOUNDARY FOR THE EICHLER PORTION OF MILLS ESTATE, AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO INVENT ONE. MARIPOSA DRIVE AND MARIPOSA COURT ARE MARKED BECAUSE SOURCES DESCRIBE THEM AS THE ONLY TWO STREETS BUILT ENTIRELY OF EICHLERS — A CLAIM WE HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO VERIFY PARCEL BY PARCEL.

Dates · sources conflict, so here is all of it

Designed 1963. Sold from late 1963. Built 1964 and 1965.

You will see “1964–1965” on most Eichler sites and “1963–1964” in the archives. Both are partly right, and the disagreement is worth showing rather than averaging away.

Source	What it says	What kind of source
UC Berkeley, Environmental Design Archives	Project folder titled “Eichler Homes of Burlingame [see also Mills Estate] 1963–1964”	Archival. The folder itself is catalogued; we could not open the record.
UC Berkeley EDA, Oakland & Imada Collection	Rendering “Mills Estate No. 19,” Claude Oakland, c. 1963, pencil on vellum, ID 15-005-003	Archival. An original drawing.
UC Berkeley EDA, Oakland & Imada Collection	Drawing “Mills Estate,” Claude Oakland, c. 1964, pencil on trace, ID 14-067-047	Archival.
Eichler Network	Tract “opened in late 1963”; elsewhere 1963–64, original price around $45,000	Journalism. The only independent reporting on this tract.
County records, individual houses	7 Mariposa Ct 1964; 2999 Frontera Way 1964; 1775 Hunt Dr 1965	Record. House by house.
Eichler marketing sites, several	“Built between 1964 and 1965”	Copied. The same sentence appears on at least four sites, so treat it as one claim, not four.

Our reading: designed 1963, sales opened late 1963, houses completed 1964–65. “1964–1965” alone drops the documented 1963 opening; “1963–1964” alone is contradicted by a 1965 house on Hunt Drive.

Size · every figure from an individual record

Four houses we could actually verify.

Rather than quote a range we cannot source, here are the four Mills Estate houses for which we found a documented square footage. Small sample, but each line is a real record rather than a rounded claim.

Address	Built	Size	Beds / baths	Lot	Note
7 Mariposa Ct	1964	2,230 sq ft	4 / 2	15,200 sq ft	Marketed as a non-atrium plan
8 Mariposa Ct	1964	2,135 sq ft	5 / 2	—	Jones & Emmons. The Harschel house
2999 Frontera Way	1964	2,139 sq ft	5 / 2	~7,840 sq ft	Enclosed atrium, ~428 sq ft
1775 Hunt Dr	1965	2,440 sq ft	4 / 2.5	~10,000 sq ft	The largest we verified

Two things fall out of this table. 8 Mariposa Court and 2999 Frontera Way are almost certainly the same plan — 2,135 and 2,139 square feet, both five bedrooms and two baths. Four square feet apart is measurement noise, not a different house.

And the lots vary enormously: 7,840 square feet on Frontera, 15,200 on Mariposa Court. That is nearly double, in a tract of a hundred houses. On a ridge this is what you would expect — the ground decides the parcel — but it means lot size is a real variable here in a way it is not on a flat tract.

The range in circulation is wrong at both ends. One Burlingame Eichler site gives “1,900–2,300 sq ft.” We could not verify anything as small as 1,900, and the 2,440 on Hunt Drive is outside the top of it.

Our published range is 2,135–2,440 square feet, and we will widen it the moment somebody shows us a smaller or larger one. Median lot across the wider neighbourhood is about 9,150 square feet, roughly a fifth of an acre.

What we could not establish

Four things this page does not tell you, because nobody has published them.

A tract boundary

No source gives a defined boundary for the Eichler portion of Mills Estate. The wider neighbourhood is bounded by I-280 on one side, but that is the neighbourhood, not the Eichler streets. The diagram above therefore shows relationships, not a line.

A verified count

“About a hundred” comes from Eichler Network and is repeated everywhere. No assessor roll, tract map or permit record has been published to support it. It is plausible and we use it; it is not checkable.

Which plan is on which street

Beyond a single attribution of 8 Mariposa Court to Jones & Emmons, no source maps plans to streets or to architects. What we do and do not know about the plans →

A sales brochure

None found. We searched archive.org directly: it holds exactly four Eichler brochures and all four are for the San Mateo Highlands. No period newspaper advertising for the Mills Estate opening surfaced either. The full list of what we are still chasing →

The single best lead we have is the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley, which holds the Oakland & Imada Collection — 57 linear feet, including site plans for 36 Eichler developments with lot and model numbers. If the Mills Estate plan numbers survive anywhere, they are in that building. If you have used that collection, we would like to hear from you.

Talk to us

Do you own one of the hundred?

We are trying to build a properly sourced record of this tract, and the owners are the source. Original plans, the purchase contract, a photograph of the house going up, a brochure in a drawer — any of it helps, and we will scan it and give it straight back.