Where it started: a house he had to be evicted from.

Sidney Bazett-Jones, a Bank of America vice president, and Louise Reno Bazett commissioned the house from Frank Lloyd Wright in April 1939. Their brief asked for one storey, a master bedroom opening to a porch, no separate dining room, easy access outdoors and shelter for two cars. It was built in 1940, to a $7,000 budget.

It is a Usonian — Wright’s term for the modest, buildable houses he believed ordinary Americans should have — and it is laid out on a hexagonal module at sixty-degree angles, like his Hanna House. The red concrete floors are scored in hexagons. There is brick, a flat roof with deep overhangs, built-in benches and bookcases, and radiant heat under the floor.

Eichler rented the Bazett House from early 1943 to 1945, with his wife and their two sons. In April 1945 Betty and Louis Frank bought it and served him a ninety-day notice. The Pacific Coast Architecture Database puts it plainly: Eichler “liked the house so much that he had to be evicted from it by its next owners.”

The Franks kept it for fifty-five years. As of 2025 it belongs to their son, Laurence Frank. It is a private residence.

Eichler credited the house with turning him into a builder. What he carried from it is visible in everything that followed: rooms that open to the garden rather than the street, a small galley kitchen, radiant heat, built-in furniture, redwood and brick with a glass wall to the rear. Every one of those turns up at 19 Irving, and a version of most of them turns up in eleven thousand tract houses.

The sources disagree on detail, so we will be exact about what they support. One Eichler Network article says the Atherton house was “based in part on the plan of the Bazett house.” A more detailed one says Anshen & Allen’s first scheme for Eichler dropped the V-plan and the hexagon, and that the revamped Lindenwood plan restored the V.

What both support is this: the built house keeps the Bazett’s V and its discipline of the angled module, but expresses it in parallelograms rather than hexagons.

You will find Eichler quoted, in many places online, on what the Bazett House taught him. We could not find a single one of those sentences in a primary source. Every account we could check paraphrases him. So this page does too. If you hold a letter, an interview or a recording in which he says it himself, we would very much like to see it.