Every Atherton Eichler on the record.

We list an address only where a published source gives one. Where a house is still somebody’s home and no source names the street number, neither do we.

These are not tract houses. Eichler Network calls 19 Irving a cinemascope version of them, and the few Atherton Eichlers with a published floor area bear that out. The X-100, Jones & Emmons’s steel showpiece in San Mateo, is drawn in for scale.

The best new find in the Atherton record is a house that no longer exists. Eichler Network’s Dave Weinstein established in 2024 that 73 Hawthorne Drive, built in 1953 for the pediatrician Dr. Mason Abramson, was a four-bedroom, three-bath Anshen & Allen house on roughly 1.85 acres, built around one of Eichler’s earliest atriums — and that it was the same model as Plan 37 in the Lindenwood brochure.

Plan 37 dates from August 1951, six years before Eichler Homes used the word “atrium.” It was marketed at $47,500, and its open-air court was eleven feet square, closed on its four sides by a bedroom, a loggia opening to the rear living room, the garage and the entry hall.

The printed plan settles some things the written record only described. The court sits behind the loggia, open to the sky and closed on every side. The kitchen is a galley with a service yard and a heater room behind it. The living room takes the whole width at one end; four bedrooms and three baths fill the other, the largest with its own wardrobe and bath. It is the same count — four bedrooms, three baths — that Eichler Network records for the Abramson house.

Chris Abramson, who grew up there, recalls the house on the cover of House Beautiful in the mid-1950s. We have not found the issue. The family sold in the mid-1970s; the buyer demolished it and the Eichler next door. The house on the site now was built in 1998.

How many Eichlers went up in Lindenwood is not settled, and the sources are all respectable. Eichler Network in 2004 counted three large models on Linden Avenue and one on Irving. Eichler Network in 2024 said “about a dozen.” Eichlervault says about five. Our own earlier site said four.

What is certain: two stood on Hawthorne Drive, of which one remains; the one across the street from Joe Eichler’s own house was lost in 2015; and of the three large models on Linden Avenue we could find no address, size or sale, and no listing on the street that mentions Eichler at all. One Atherton Eichler, Eichler Network reports, was torn down so that a neighbour could extend a garden.

Half a mile north of Lindenwood, on two back-to-back streets, is the only other Eichler cluster in town. Eichler Network calls it the Eichler Six, built as Eichler returned to Atherton with somewhat more success in 1959 and 1960. Four of the six remain by its 2017 feature; a blog post the same summer counts five.

On Encina Avenue, Eric and Rena Lane — he is the planning commissioner quoted on our preservation page — live in a 1959 soaring-gable model whose kitchen still largely looks as Eichler left it. The Pinkston family’s house, theirs since 2000, is about 2,000 square feet.

In 1959 Eichler planned a custom house for Willie Mays at Middlefield Road and Encina Avenue — the edge of the Eichler Six. Bob Anshen and Steve Allen drew the first scheme in July, an asymmetrical plan with several projecting wings, and revised it in August.

By September Jones & Emmons had taken it over. Their plan set four bedrooms along one side and pushed the master bedroom out into the garden; with the garage it would have passed 3,500 square feet. It was never built. The Mays family left for New Rochelle after the 1959 season.

The drawings survive, in the A. Quincy Jones papers at UCLA’s Young Research Library.