How big are Burlingame Eichler homes?

The four floor areas we have verified individually are 2,135, 2,139, 2,230 and 2,440 square feet. That is a large Eichler — the 1964–65 houses were among the biggest he built. No plan schedule for the tract has been published, so we cannot tell you the full range that was offered, only the four we can stand behind.

Do Burlingame Eichlers have radiant heat?

The houses were built with copper radiant tubing in the concrete slab, as Eichler houses of this period were. Sixty years on, an original system is at or past its design life. Whether a particular house still runs on its original loops, has been repiped, or has been converted to another system is a house-by-house question and one of the most consequential things to establish before buying.

1964–65 · Mills Estate

What the house is made of.

These are late Eichlers, and late Eichlers are big ones. Everything below is either verified on a specific house in this tract, or is the documented standard for Eichler construction in these years and is labelled as such. We have not mixed the two.

Verified in this tract

Four floor areas — 2,135, 2,139, 2,230, 2,440 sq ft. One atrium at 428 sq ft. Everything else here is the era standard, not a tract-specific measurement.

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. — **The shed roof, and what it is for.** The roof plane lifts to the right, and the gap it opens under the beams is filled with glass — a **clerestory** band that lights the whole depth of the plan while the wall below it stays solid to the street. This is the Eichler argument in one elevation: privacy at eye level, daylight above it. Note the hills behind. Mills Estate is a ridge.

A cream-painted two-storey Eichler in Burlingame, with stacked vertical-boarded volumes, a clerestory band on the upper floor, a shed roof over an open carport with a lamp post, and a walled entry court to the left. — **A two-storey Eichler, in Burlingame.** Nothing in the published record on this tract mentions two-storey models, which makes this photograph evidence rather than decoration. Note what it does **not** do: it does not put a bedroom over the living room and call it a day. The upper volume is stepped back and broken into boxes, the clerestory band carries round it, and the whole upper floor sits behind a low shed roof over an open carport — so from the kerb the house still reads horizontal.

The specification.

Element	What it is	Basis
Built	1964–65. Designed 1963, lots sold late 1963.	Archival drawings dated 1963; build dates from county records.
Architect	Claude Oakland for the tract; Jones & Emmons attributable to 8 Mariposa Court.	Two catalogued drawings; the Jones & Emmons house is single-sourced.
Floor area	2,135–2,440 sq ft across four verified houses.	County records, four houses. Not a plan schedule.
Structure	Post-and-beam. Exposed beams on a regular bay, non-structural infill walls, which is why the glass walls are possible.	Eichler standard, these years.
Roof	Flat deck, or folded plate — the folded plate is documented in this tract and is the architecturally notable thing about it.	Form documented; the count is open.
Roof deck	Tongue-and-groove decking spanning beam to beam, exposed below as the finished ceiling. There is no attic and no second ceiling.	Eichler standard.
Floor	Concrete slab on grade, no crawl space.	Eichler standard; consistent with every house we have been in here.
Heating	Copper radiant tubing embedded in the slab. No ducts, no registers in the original rooms.	Eichler standard, these years.
Glazing	Single-glazed, floor-to-ceiling, concentrated at the rear and any atrium.	Eichler standard.
Street elevation	Largely blind — siding, solid door, minimal glazing.	Observed across the tract.
Atrium	Present on some houses. 428 sq ft at 2999 Frontera Way.	One house verified. Atriums →
Lot	Hillside parcels from the 1954 Mills Estate subdivision, not laid out by Eichler.	The land →
Jurisdiction	City of Burlingame, ZIP 94010. City services, city schools.	103 Cal.App.2d 885 →

Sixty years on

The four systems that decide what a house here costs to own.

The slab and its tubing

Original copper radiant loops from 1964–65 are at or past design life. A documented repipe, a manifold conversion, or a working original with service records are three very different propositions. An unknown system is the largest single unquantified liability in one of these houses.

The roof

A flat or low-slope deck is a maintenance item on a schedule, not a thirty-year forget-about-it. On a folded plate the valleys and the membrane detailing matter more than the material.

The glass

Single-glazed floor-to-ceiling is original, is the reason the house is worth having, and is the comfort complaint. Upgrades that keep the sightlines and the frame proportions hold value; ones that do not, reduce it.

The envelope at the hillside

Mills Estate is a hillside subdivision, so drainage, retaining structures and how water moves around a slab-on-grade house vary far more here than on the flat Eichler tracts. Worth a specific look on every house.

None of this is a reason not to own one. All of it is a reason to know which version you are buying. How each one moves the number →

What is not on this page

No plan numbers, no bedroom counts, no price list.

Two plan designations for this tract circulate online. We could not find an archival, scholarly or journalistic source behind either, so they are not here. The full reasoning →

A bedroom-and-bath schedule would require a plan schedule, which nobody has published. Four verified floor areas tell you the tract was not single-plan — and our own photographs now push that much further, showing a flat deck, a shed roof, four different gables and a two-storey house across the eight streets. None of that tells you what was offered, or under what names.

And no original prices, because no Mills Estate advertisement, price card or brochure has surfaced. For the Highlands we can show you the actual sales brochures with the prices printed in them. For this tract there is nothing, and we are not going to estimate backwards and present it as a record.

The twelve things we still do not know →

Talk to us

Own one? Fill in a blank.

A floor area, a bedroom count, an atrium measurement, a repipe date — every one of those is a data point that currently exists nowhere. We will publish it without your address if you prefer.