What was Mills Estate before the Eichlers?

It was the country estate of Darius Ogden Mills, founder of the Bank of California, who began acquiring the land around 1860 and named it Millbrae. It grew to about 1,500 acres and carried the Millbrae Dairy. Mills died in 1910; his heirs held the land largely intact until the 1930s. The 42-room mansion burned in June 1954, and the land was subdivided that year.

Who subdivided Mills Estate?

Paul Trousdale, the Los Angeles developer behind Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills, financed by Texas oil man Clint Murchison. The Burlingame Historical Society calls it Burlingame's last subdivision of the 20th century. Trousdale Drive and Murchison Drive are named for them. Eichler did not subdivide this land — he bought lots inside it roughly a decade later.

1860 – 1954

A banker's fifteen hundred acres, and the fire that ended them.

Eichler did not lay out this ground. By the time he arrived it had already been a dairy, a country estate, the subject of a five-year annexation fight, and — briefly — a burnt shell. The subdivision he built in was somebody else's, and it was already a decade old.

Why the street is called Trousdale

Trousdale Drive and Murchison Drive are named for the Los Angeles developer and the Texas oil financier who bought the estate and cut it into lots in 1954. The same Paul Trousdale gave his name to Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills. The Eichlers sit on his street grid.

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.

A cream Eichler in Burlingame with a glazed gable rising behind a level clerestory band, a red front door, two timber garage doors, and a gravel garden of clipped shrubs and columnar conifers. — **The same plan, landscaped completely differently.** Compare it to the same plan kept with a lawn. Gravel, clipped forms and columnar conifers — a garden doing what the architecture does, which is repeat a few simple shapes at intervals. Eichlers take this kind of planting better than almost any other tract house.

The sequence

Ninety-four years, in order.

c.1860Darius Ogden Mills acquires the land. Founder of the Bank of California, he builds a country estate and names it Millbrae — his own name plus the brook running through it. He establishes the Millbrae Dairy and around 1863 gives land for the railroad station. The estate reaches 1,500 acres.
1910Mills dies. His heirs hold the property largely intact.
1930sThe heirs begin selling portions of the estate.
1946–51The annexation fight. Burlingame annexes a hundred-foot strip shaped like a horseshoe around roughly 730 unannexed acres. Millbrae moves to incorporate and capture both. It goes to the Court of Appeal. The whole story →
June 1954The mansion burns. The 42-room house, built in the 1860s, is destroyed.
1954Subdivision. Paul Trousdale's construction company, financed by Clint Murchison, subdivides the estate. The Burlingame Historical Society calls it “Burlingame's last subdivision of the 20th century.” Construction begins in December.
1963Eichler arrives, buying lots inside the existing subdivision. Claude Oakland's drawings for “Mills Estate” are dated this year. Sales open late in the year.
1964–65The hundred Eichlers are completed. The tract →

What it means for the houses

The street grid is not Eichler's.

In almost every tract that carries his name — the San Mateo Highlands, Greenmeadow, Fairglen — Eichler bought raw land and laid it out himself, which is why those tracts have a recognisable street logic: cul-de-sacs, long blocks, garages to the street, houses turned inward.

Mills Estate was already drawn when he got there. The roads, the lot lines and the grades were Trousdale's, set nine years earlier for conventional hillside houses. What Eichler contributed was a hundred buildings dropped into someone else's plan.

That shows up in the thing owners here notice first: the lots are wildly inconsistent. We verified one at 7,840 square feet and another at 15,200 — nearly double, in the same tract, on the same ridge.

It is also why the tract has no single entrance, no consistent orientation, and no published boundary. There is no Eichler tract map to publish, because the recorded map is a 1954 Trousdale subdivision that covers far more than the Eichler streets.

Foster City is the other end of this spectrum — there Eichler was one of three builders on T. Jack Foster's master plan, deliberately interleaved with conventional houses. The comparison →

One name, two cities — do not get caught by this

“Mills Estates” as a neighbourhood name straddles the Burlingame–Millbrae line. Property portals serve the same neighbourhood under both cities, and the area spans ZIP 94010 (Burlingame) and 94030 (Millbrae).

Every Eichler address we verified is on the Burlingame, 94010 side. The Millbrae portion is served by Millbrae schools and Mills High School — do not let those figures bleed into a Burlingame conversation. Which schools actually serve these addresses →