Illustration by Cindy Couling

Large homes spark controversy

Once-popular earth tones and redwood have given way to statement houses

By Steve Enders and Jeff Kearns

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This is the first of two articles on housing trends in the West Valley, and the efforts by local planners to maintain community standards without violating the rights of those who want to build their dream homes.

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High in the hills above Saratoga, James Walgren, that city's Community Development Director, points in the direction where expensive homes dot the folds of oak-studded hills that appear to roll silently into the haze. He points to two houses not far from one another to make a point about architecture--then and now.

One home is an angular design of stained redwood with tall pane windows and a shake roof, partially obscured by oak trees. It is a big home, but not one that detracts from the sweeping hillside.

Not far away, perched on the bare back of a cleared ridge, is a stately Mediterranean-style home painted a fleshy-beige color and topped with a red tile roof. White columns hold up the roof.

Walgren speaks to the stark design difference as an example of the architectural eras that gave birth to the two disparate designs. "In the '60s, it was all about fitting into the environment, but the roaring '80s were the opposite--you wanted your home to stand out as an edifice to your success."

Examples of the latter sprawl across Mt. Eden Valley, large pink, yellow and white homes easily visible from miles away.

Subtle battles waged

In the communities of the West Valley, subtle battles are being waged in neighborhoods and inside city halls and planning departments. The battles are being fought over development, which is encroaching on hillsides and previously undeveloped pockets of many existing neighborhoods.

Property values are high all over the valley, but particularly in the West Valley. It takes a certain degree of success to live in these communities in the first place.

They come for the schools, the nearby hills, the status. Some buy homes built years ago--before there was a Silicon Valley. Others come to build their dream homes. And some come to turn a small older home into a dream house.

Residents decide what they want in a house, and architects design them. Architects are artists who must, sometimes grudgingly, adhere to community standards imposed by planning commissions. In many cases, architects will use "good judgment" in designing a home. In other cases, they might not. It all depends on what the community believes is good or bad design sense--or how many angry neighbors show up to shake their fists at a Planning Commission meeting.

When neighbors from an established neighborhood show up to protest a new home or a large addition, the aspiring new kid on the block is often disparaged as a "pink palace" or a "monster home." When neighbors band together against a proposed large home, they often use the words "consistency," "continuity" and "character." This is especially true in historic neighborhoods in West Valley communities like Los Gatos.

Faux Mediterranean

The popularity in recent years of what some call the faux Mediterranean style has caused particular consternation in West Valley communities that evolved with a sensibility about homes fitting in with the environment.

Berkeley-based architect Chris Spaulding calls it the Americanized Mediterranean-Pistache vocabulary. And stucco siding, which is its most common attribute, owes its overwhelming popularity to the scarcity and high cost of wood.

"Wood siding is very expensive," Spaulding says. "Redwood and cedar are expensive and hard to maintain." And the wood that's available generally isn't very high quality.

Hence, stucco is everywhere.

Other telltale characteristics of this style are the 20-foot-tall entryways flanked by pillars with tall bay windows in the front.

In sprawling new subdivisions, nary a permit is disputed. But in neighborhoods where smaller, one-story homes have covered the valley floor since the postwar boom, builders who want to impose big stucco homes can expect a fight. Public hearings at normally somnolent Planning Commission meetings are lively at best--and downright uncomfortable at worst. Neighbors squabble in an "us against them" scenario--people who like the style because they're building it pitted against the people who don't like it, usually because they own a smaller house just down the street.

In cities like Cupertino and Santa Clara, the situation is fiercely contested and, in some cases, has taken squabbles to another level, sparking allegations of racial bias and discrimination. A Vietnamese family which spent a year trying to get approval for a second story in an older Santa Clara neighborhood, for instance, suggested the opposition might be racially motivated. The city finally granted the approval.


Photograph by George Sakkestad

Complaints from neighbors about the five auxiliary structures in this compound where Ken Peake once kept his dairy cows, prompted the Monte Sereno City Council to limit large lots to two auxiliary structures--without a public hearing for a use permit.




Developing guidelines

In response to the friction in neighborhoods over "new home" mentality and "established neighborhood" mentality, many local planning departments and city councils are rushing to develop guidelines and standards so neighborhoods don't end up with a situation like the one in a neighborhood near Lawrence Expressway and Bollinger Road. Here, boxy Eichlers are surrounded by a '50s ranch house on one side and a modern, two-story stucco and glass-paned "pink palace" on the other.

So far, for the most part Saratoga, Los Gatos and Monte Sereno have avoided such extremes. The people on the cities' side say that's simply because of the diligent planning and good foresight of the planners.

Still, despite said good planning and standards, battles are being fought here, and some new houses that straddle many people's figurative lines of what's bad or good taste have slipped through the cracks.

Monte Sereno recently updated the building and development section of its city code, after a new home caused an uproar among neighbors.

Set on a corner of Ken Peake's former dairy farm, at Bicknell Road and Danielle Place, the new two-story home, white with red trim, is surrounded by five similarly painted accessory structures: a movie room, a four-car garage, a pool house, a workshop and a mother-in-law cottage.

When neighbors saw what was taking shape, complaints started pouring into City Hall. In January, the City Council, eager to put a stop to new construction before something else could slip through the cracks, declared a moratorium.

But the moratorium was met with even more protest, from homeowners doing kitchen remodels or add-ons, and the council limited the moratorium to accessory structures until it could make changes to the new city code that was in the works at the time.

The new code cut the maximum number of accessory structures of larger lots from five to two, and stipulated that any application for more than that required a use permit--and a public City Council hearing. The city also started requiring not just the plans to the house, but also information about landscape, building materials and accessory structures.

But if architects are truly artists, and this is America and people are trying to fulfill the American dream, then shouldn't they be able to build structures as they see fit?

Changing Lifestyles

New houses are popping up all over, and in established neighborhoods the homes are growing upwards because spreading out is seldom an option. What's more, modern families building new homes want space for the way they live today--home offices, home theaters and the like.

The issues surrounding the building of new homes or adding on to those already there, are literally tearing some neighborhoods apart to the point where it's surely uncomfortable for the new residents to move in once the house is actually built.

In many cases, the applicants for such developments often stick to their guns, and are only willing to make limited concessions because they say they need what they've asked for.

"Development becomes more obvious when there's less potential," says Monte Sereno City Manager Brian Loventhal. "People are seeing the impacts of it more and more."

Partly to blame, he says, are property values, which have shot up because of the population and wealth of the region. "When you spend a million dollars on a piece of property, people tend to want to have their dream houses built. And that may not fit in with the neighborhood," Loventhal says.

So cities now are mandating that builders put up story poles--wooden and orange-tape skeletons to illustrate planned structure shape--and increased noticing of projects. In many cases, applications for new homes require the builder to tell neighbors within 300 feet of their intent to build, allowing responses to the city from those who may not like the plans. Also, builders are having to submit detailed plans for everything from landscaping and grading of the property to the color scheme of the house.

In the highly charged battles over so-called monster houses in less flamboyant neighborhoods, existing residents often accuse would-be residents of "bad taste." The reality is that the difference in taste often has more to do with expectations and how tastes were developed.

"I have a design background," says Monte Sereno's 29-year-old Loventhal. "You have to be able to sell your project. Any architect . . . will say that a project shouldn't be dictated by its surroundings. They don't truly want to preserve neighborhood character."

But renowned architect and developer Goodwin Steinberg, who's been involved in developing high-profile structures for large cities and houses for families up and down the Peninsula since the 1950s, sees things differently. He says that he has always attempted to incorporate design elements of his projects into their surroundings.

If he built a house on a hill, he says, he'd consider shaping it to the ridgeline--completing the dome on a hill by designing the house as such.

"People have a resistance to change," Steinberg says. "The standards aren't the same anymore either. Now, there are a lot of young people that can afford land, and people are building houses that are commensurate with their income.

"It's not necessarily that people are building bigger houses. The community standards have changed."

Steinberg doesn't think those standards have gone too far, either, especially in Los Gatos and Saratoga.

When Steinberg first began working here, planning was too lackadaisical, he says. Back then, people were pushing hills around and building what they wanted, where they wanted.

When Saratoga's Walgren was a fresh-faced graduate of urban planning school, it was during the '80s and the beginnings of Bay Area affluence. Along with the money came the boom in housing, which is still being played out today.

Then, there was even more head-butting over design elements because people wanted to build and sell quickly while the market was hot.

"Now, new homeowners move into neighborhoods where people have generally been for 25 years, and put up something that's out of character with what's there historically," he says.

There's that word again: character.

Walgren, like others in similar positions, says that character means different things to different people. It can be that a house with a three-car garage isn't going to look good in a neighborhood with two-car garages. Or, it could be the house's color, the number of windows on the front or the amount of unbroken, flat wall space facing the street.

In one Saratoga development of three new houses near the Federated Church, the buildings look exactly like their neighbors. It's that way because planners liked the character of the street.

Recently, a development application was turned down off Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road because the developer wanted to add turret-like features to his homes.

They simply didn't fit with what Saratoga is all about, Walgren says. The developer eventually redesigned his plans, which were finally approved and are now being built.

The "pink palace" trend, which became popular in the '80s, is starting to fade, according to architect Spaulding.

"It's getting to be so common that people are looking for something else," he says. "People aren't really wanting to be seen as much. It's not preferred like it was in the mid-'90s."

Instead, Spaulding says, customers who come to him now are looking for more English and French styles.

Whether residents comfortably en-sconced in their ranch-style homes and their California bungalows will find huge English Tudors better neighbors than "pink palaces" remains to be seen.

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Next week: Remodels and Teardowns

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