My family and I recently realized a long-standing dream -- to own a home
that embodies good functional modern architecture, has a wide-open
California "feel" to it, and is a joy to live in.
My family and I recently realized a long-standing dream -- to own a home
that embodies good functional modern architecture, has a wide-open
California "feel" to it, and is a joy to live in.
Left: Reflections of -- and through -- our central atrium
Right: Our front door which enters into the atrium.
Left: Entering our glass-walled living room from the atrium.
Right: The view from Matt's bedroom.
Left: Looking from the living room into the dining room.
Right: The back yard and pool area.
Left: Poolside.
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Betsy Speicher's Home Page
Our home is an "Eichler" built by iconoclastic real estate developer
Joseph Eichler who believed that uncompromisingly fine design could be
made affordable and should be made available to those capable of
appreciating it.
While thousands of Eichler Homes were built in Northern California, ours
is one of only about four hundred which were built in Southern
California. Our development consists of 67 homes designed by noted
architects Frederick Emmons and A. Quincy Jones (like ours) or by Claude
Oakland. The house is built around a central atrium, open to the sky,
which the main rooms face and open out onto. The "walls" which divide
the house from the atrium in the center and the yard to the rear are
floor-to-ceiling sheets of glass which slide open for air and light.
Ours is the five-bedroom, two-bath model with the pitched roof. Two of
the bedrooms have been combined into one huge master bedroom for Steve
and me while Matt has the former master bedroom which faces the pool.
Steve and I each have our own offices in the two remaining bedrooms.
The interior is very light and bright. In addition to the walls of
glass, there are several skylights. Eichlers are so breezy and
cool that they don't need air conditioning. Instead of forced-air
heat and furnaces they have "radiant" heat with hot water flowing
through pipes in the floor to warm the house. This is a heating
system Frank Lloyd Wright often used.
This is the first time we have had our own pool and we love it!
Over to the right of the pool, where you can't see it is an
eight foot tall papier-mache Tiki idol which is left over from the
time they filmed an Hawaiian Punch commercial in our back yard.
If you want to find out more about Eichler Homes, check out the
Eichler Network
on the Web. In additon, there is a new
book all about them titled Eichler Homes: Design for Living
by Jerry Ditto. It is filled with beautiful pictures, information
about these homes, and the story of Joseph Eichler, the visionary
who built them.