Burlingame Eichlers / Open questions
Twelve questions · mostly no answers yet
The parts we could not settle.
Every other page on this site tells you what we found. This one tells you where we stopped. It is the most useful page here, because it is the list a neighbour, an archivist or an original owner could close in an afternoon — and one of them got closed this month by a camera.
Write to Eichlers@Boyenga.com. We will publish the answer with the source named, and strike the question off this page with a date on it.
The list.
| Question | Where it stands | What would close it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. How many were actually built? | “About a hundred” appears everywhere and is derived nowhere we can find. | A parcel-level pass across the eight streets, or a Burlingame building-permit series for 1964–65. |
| 2. Which plans were offered? | No plan schedule exists in any source. Two numbers circulate with nothing behind them. Why we do not print them → | The two catalogued drawings at UC Berkeley read in person. |
| 3. Was there a sales brochure? | Unknown. Eichler produced them for other tracts in these years; none for Mills Estate has surfaced. | One original in an attic. This is the single item most likely to still exist. |
| 4. What did they sell for new? | No price list, no advertisement, no closing figure has surfaced for this tract. | A 1964–65 newspaper advertisement, or an original owner's paperwork. |
| 5. Where does the tract actually end? | No published boundary. Our map is an explicit schematic, not a survey. See the caveat on it → | The recorded subdivision map for the Eichler lots within Mills Estate. |
| 6. Are the two Mariposas really all Eichler? | Stated in the sources, unverified by us. Two addresses on Mariposa Court confirmed individually. | Anyone who lives on either street with ten minutes and a clipboard. |
| 7. Is Montecito Way an Eichler street? | Appears in one source we do not otherwise trust, so we do not print it as one. | A single confirmed Eichler address on it. |
| 8. How many houses did Jones & Emmons do here? | One is attributable — 8 Mariposa Court — and even that is single-sourced. The rest of the tract reads as Claude Oakland. | The Berkeley sheets, or a Jones & Emmons job list covering 1963. |
| 9. How many have folded-plate roofs? | The form is documented here, which is what makes this tract architecturally interesting. The count is not. The roof → | A drive of the eight streets with a camera, or the plan schedule. |
| 10. How many atriums? | One documented, at 2999 Frontera Way, at 428 sq ft. | Assessor sketches, or owners telling us. Atriums → |
| 11. How many two-storey houses are there? | We have photographed one — and no published source on this tract mentions two-storey models at all. So the existence question is closed and the count question is wide open. The photograph → | A drive of the eight streets. This is the easiest question on the page to answer and nobody has answered it. |
| 12. Why is this tract missing from the literature? | Genuinely open. A hundred houses by Eichler's own architects, at the end of the best years, and the books skip it. | Probably nothing will close this one. It may simply be that a hundred houses was too few to notice. Where it sits in the run → |
Why publish this at all
A list of what we do not know is a competitive disadvantage. We printed it anyway.
The usual move is to write around the gaps — state the hundred as a fact, print the plan numbers because everyone else does, draw the boundary with a confident line. That produces a page that reads better and is worse.
We would rather be the people who told you which parts are soft. When you are deciding what to pay for a house, knowing that nobody has ever published a plan schedule for the tract is more useful than being handed a plan number that turns out to be somebody's guess from 2011.
It also sets the standard we hold our own copy to. Three of the errors on the corrections page are ours. They are there because this page exists, not in spite of it.
Last reviewed September 2026. Questions get struck off this page with a date, never quietly deleted. Question 11 was added in September 2026, after our own photography turned up a two-storey house in a tract whose literature does not mention one.
Talk to us
Can you close one of these?
An address, a photograph, a permit number, a memory. Twelve questions, and most of them are the kind a neighbour can answer from the sidewalk.
Added 18 September 2026
Foster City's rules are mid-change, and we cannot date them cleanly.
Foster City's own planning page is unambiguous on the substance: “A planning permit is required for almost all exterior changes to any residential, commercial or industrial building in Foster City,” covering fences, decks, windows, doors, room additions, trellises, patio covers and gazebos, replacement as well as new build. What we cannot pin down is the framework behind it.
The city has been consolidating its Zoning Code, its Architectural and Solar Design Guidelines (adopted 1989, amended 1997 and 2001) and a set of citywide policies — reroofing, window replacement, exterior colour change, solar impacts — into a single set of Objective Design and Development Standards, written, in the city's words, “to have no personal or subjective judgment by a public official and city staff.”
The dates do not agree. A city policy page states the single-family and two-family standards were approved by Council on 15 December 2025, with submittals after 19 February 2026 falling under new Municipal Code Chapter 17.15. The city's own engagement page for the same project still describes the single-family standards as in development with hearings running into January 2026. One of those pages is stale and we cannot tell which from the outside.
Eichlers were named in the drafting. A 5 June 2025 planning meeting agenda lists “Eichler Homes” as a topic in part two of the draft regulations, which means whatever emerged may treat them specifically. We have not read the adopted chapter.
Until we have, this site says only what the planning page says: a permit for almost any exterior change. Anyone relying on this for a Foster City purchase or remodel should ring planning@fostercity.org or 650-286-3225 and ask which chapter applies to their submittal date. We would.