Residents lobby to preserve home styles

By Jeff Kearns

When Cupertino officials conducted a citywide architectural survey in January 1999, only one neighborhood emerged as having any kind of consistent architectural style: the Fairgrove neighborhood on the city's southern edge.

Despite surrounding developments, the designs of the neighborhood's 220 original Eichler homes remained mostly unmodified. Architect Joseph Eichler built hundreds of homes in the Bay Area and California from 1950 to 1974, almost all of which were distinctly styled with low-pitched or flat roofs, large windows and muted, earth-tone colors. The first Eichler homes appeared in Sunnyvale in 1950.

After the survey, a handful of Fairgrove residents began working with city planners on a draft of an ordinance that would have created a new residential zone just for the Eichlers in the area. The proposed zoning would have made it all but impossible to demolish or modify the unique houses.

But several homeowners from the neighborhood showed up at a public hearing on the proposed ordinance at the March 13 Planning Commission meeting to say that, although they agreed with the spirit of the proposed ordinance, they didn't want City Hall to tell them how to remodel their aging homes.

Commissioners sent the plan back, and told the residents and city planners to work on a set of guidelines, instead of an ordinance.

"I think it's very clear we still want to have something in this neighborhood that maintains the character of the Eichlers and a lot of the forms. But we may not want to have an ordinance," Planning Commission chair Andrea Harris said. "We may want to do it through some kind of design guideline requirement."

The subdivision of Eichlers, which was built in the early 1960s, is bounded by Bollinger Road, Miller Avenue, Tantau Avenue and Phil Lane. In a letter to the commission, one homeowner said the original homes sold for $20,000.

Gary Vishup, one of the Fairgrove residents on the committee, said the group was formed because many homeowners in the area didn't want "monster homes" that disrupted the character of the neighborhood.

Commissioners put the Eichler plan on indefinite hold, until a revised version of the plan comes back from staff and residents.

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