Eichler Tour

In the early 1960s, real estate developer Joseph Eichler commissioned the local firm of famed architect A. Quincy Jones to design a tract of homes on the north end of the San Fernando Valley. The homes, located off of Balboa and Woodley, are distinctly modern, with low-sloping A-framed roofs, clean vertical lines and unadorned facades. Embracing the mid-century “indoor-outdoor” philosophy of design, each home is situated around a small open atrium that greets the visitor at the front door. Other features include concrete floors, post-and-beam ceilings and burlap-covered closet doors that conspire to give the houses an extremely natural—as opposed to human-made—feeling. We, of course, love Eichler homes and so were thrilled to be able to tour six excellent examples yesterday with the Friends of the Gamble House, a preservationist group that sponsors various architectural tours. Indoor photography was mostly restricted (don't want the world to know what's behind those deceivingly simple exteriors), so here’s a taste of what we saw (click on the images to enlarge):