The builder who hired architects.

Joseph Eichler was born in New York City on 25 June 1900 and took a business degree at New York University in 1920. In 1927 he moved to San Francisco, where his wife Lillian’s family had taken over Nye & Nissen, a wholesale dairy and egg business. He became its treasurer.

From 1943 to 1945 the Eichlers rented the Bazett House in Hillsborough, a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian. (One source puts the start at 1942.) Everything after follows from those years.

He began building in 1947 as the Sunnyvale Building Company, and put up about three hundred conventional houses before he hired an architect. Eichler Homes dates from 1949. It was Bob Anshen who persuaded him that architects should design the houses at all.

In 1950 Architectural Forum named his work subdivision of the year. In 1951 he brought in Jones & Emmons from Los Angeles, and from 1960 he contracted directly with Claude Oakland.

Eichler sold houses to buyers of any race at a time when most American builders would not, and on 1 July 1958 he resigned from the National Association of Home Builders over it. He told House and Home that year:

In the same interview he allowed that most builders were probably no more in favour of discrimination than he was — but were bound by custom, or afraid of losing money.

In 1951 he built his own house on Irving Avenue, in the Lindenwood estate he was trying to develop, and lived there until 1965. It was where new ideas were tried before they reached the tracts. We listed it in 2024.

Eichler Homes collapsed in the late 1960s. The sources date the end anywhere from 1965 to 1968; Eichler Network reports that Joe refused to file for Chapter 11. In 1966 he started again as Joseph L. Eichler Associates, working once more with Jones & Emmons and Claude Oakland. The Klingbeil Company bought that firm in 1972. He died in 1974.

His son Ned Eichler wrote the history of the whole trade, The Merchant Builders, published by MIT Press in 1982. It is on our reading list.