Did Eichler build duplexes anywhere else?

No. Twelve units in six buildings on Roble Avenue in Redwood City, in 1956, and nowhere else. Dave Weinstein of Eichler Network writes that Eichler went on to build a wide variety of housing — ‘although, unless some remain to be found, he never built duplexes again.’

Eichler Network says five buildings. Why do you say six?

Because we counted. Eichler Network documents five duplex buildings and ten residences on Roble Avenue, and that is the figure repeated everywhere else. We walked the street and found six. This is not a careless published record — these buildings are genuinely easy to miscount, because several carry one street number on the assessor roll and two on the kerb, which conflates buildings with units. We publish our number, name the five already documented, and are adding the parcel evidence for the sixth.

How do I tell an Eichler duplex from two adjacent Eichler houses?

One parcel, two street addresses. 393 and 395 Roble are both APN 059-151-050. Two adjacent single-family Eichlers always carry two separate APNs. A shared driveway is not a shared wall.

What do the Roble Avenue duplexes look like?

Low gabled roofs rather than Atherwood's butterflies, with a paired carport in the centre of each building and both front doors opening into it. Around 945 square feet per unit, with floor-to-ceiling glass, wood panelling, a fireplace and a private rear patio.

How do Eichler duplexes trade compared with single-family Eichlers?

At a substantial discount per square foot, because the market prices them as income property on rent multiples rather than as architecture — roughly 40 to 48 per cent of a renovated single-family Eichler's price per square foot.

The Eichler duplexes on Roble Avenue — the only ones he ever built

01 · What they are

Rental housing, from a builder who sold houses.

Eichler Homes built these to lease, not to sell. A 1956 San Mateo Times advertisement offered "Deluxe Eichler Duplexes for lease" — a two-bedroom, one-bath unit at $146 a month. Leasing was handled by Al Eichler, Joe's brother.

The reasoning was land. By the mid-fifties Peninsula lots were getting expensive, and a duplex put two households on a parcel that would otherwise carry one. It was Eichler reaching for the entry-level market with the tools he had.

Dave Weinstein, writing for Eichler Network, puts the outcome plainly: Eichler went on to build a wide variety of housing — "although, unless some remain to be found, he never built duplexes again." He moved to townhouses and apartments instead. Greenmeadow townhouses around 1960, Greenmeadow Apartments in Palo Alto in 1961, Ferne Avenue in 1963, and then the San Francisco high-rise work that ultimately overextended the company.

So Roble Avenue is not an early example of a type. It is the whole type.

What they look like

Low gabled roofs — not Atherwood's butterflies. Two units mirrored about a centre line, with a paired carport in the middle of the building, and the front doors and utility closets opening inside that carport. From the kerb the six buildings are near-identical and tell themselves apart mostly by paint colour.

Inside, the Eichler vocabulary survives at small scale: floor-to-ceiling glass, wood panelling, a fireplace, and a private rear yard with a covered patio for each unit.

Built: 1956
Where: Roble Avenue, 94061 — Redwood Oaks, on the Atherton side
Parcels: Assessor book-page 059-151, five contiguous parcels
Units: 10, two per building
Per unit: ~945 sq ft, 2 bed
Building: ~1,890 sq ft on 6,900–9,900 sq ft lots
Roof: Low gable
Parking: Paired central carport
Zoning: R-2, Residential Duplex District
Scale: 6 buildings, 12 units, ~945 sq ft per unit
Architect: [unattributed — see below]
Tract name: [not recorded in any source we found]

We are not going to put an architect's name on this page. No source credits one. Jones & Emmons were doing Eichler's subdivision work by 1956, which makes them a reasonable guess — and a guess is not good enough for a building this rare. Redwood City building permits for 1955–56, or the Environmental Design Archives at Berkeley, would settle it.

02 · Where 1956 sits

The two-year gap, and what closes it.

Most accounts of Eichler in Redwood City end at 1954. They are ending one building too early.

Nov 1950: Atherwood — Anshen & Allen, plan AA-1. His first subdivision in San Mateo County, and the butterfly roofs
1953: Fairwood, Lyons Street — around 1,300 sq ft, three bedrooms
1954: Sequoia Meadow — the last subdivision, 1,110 sq ft predominant. Then nothing
1955: Nothing in Redwood City. San Mateo Highlands is under way
1956: Roble Avenue. Twelve units, six buildings, built to lease at $146 a month. Not for sale, not a subdivision, and not repeated anywhere else in his career. The last thing Eichler built in this city
1957–58: The atrium arrives as a marketed feature — a year after these were finished, which is why no Eichler in Redwood City has one
Later: Eichler keeps building multi-family — Greenmeadow townhouses, apartments — but never another duplex

Chronology assembled from county records, period advertising and Eichler Network reporting. The 1956 build year comes from the assessor roll; the permit date [not yet pulled] would fix it exactly. See the full timeline for how this maps onto Eichler's work elsewhere.

03 · Identification

One parcel, two addresses. That is the whole test.

Roble Avenue is zoned R-2, so the street is full of duplexes. Most of them are not Eichlers. Architecture will mislead you here; the assessor's roll will not.

The fast check: 393 and 395 Roble are two street addresses on one APN — 059-151-050. Two adjacent single-family Eichlers always carry two separate APNs. A shared driveway is not a shared wall.
Use code: The six Eichler parcels read "2 units." A single-family Eichler reads "Single Family Residential."
Footprint: ~1,890 sq ft of improvement on one lot, recorded as four bedrooms and two baths in total. Two side-by-side Eichlers would show roughly 1,100–1,450 sq ft each, on their own lots.
The carport: Centre of the building, shared, with both front doors opening into it. No single-family Eichler is planned that way.
The roof: Low gable. If it has a butterfly roof it is an Atherwood house, not a duplex.
Then confirm: Pull the assessor map for book-page 059-151 and the recorded map behind it.

No photographs here yet — deliberately

We have walked Roble and we have read the kerb numbers, but we have not photographed these buildings ourselves, and we are not going to illustrate the rarest thing Eichler ever built with a picture of something else. Until we do, the street is public: you can drive it from your desk.

Walk Roble Avenue Own one? Let us photograph it

On the count. Eichler Network documents five buildings and ten residences. We have walked the street and counted six. The five already in the published record are 390, 392–394, 393–395, 396 and 397–399 Roble Avenue; the sixth is [address to publish]. Part of why the number moves around is that some of these carry one street number on the assessor roll and two on the kerb, so the count of units and the count of buildings get conflated in secondary sources. Our figure is six buildings, twelve units — and we will publish the parcel numbers behind it rather than ask anyone to take our word for it.

04 · Look-alikes

What is on that street and is not an Eichler.

We would rather lose a listing than mislabel a building, so:

383–385 Roble — a duplex, but 1959 and about 2,700 square feet. Wrong year, wrong size, no Eichler reference in the record. Treat as not an Eichler until a permit says otherwise.
374 Roble — a 1948 single-family ranch on a different assessor page.
381 Roble — coded five or more units.

And one that matters more than the others: 396 Roble appears in county data as a 1956 two-unit building, but we believe the site has since been redeveloped as new construction. [confirm] If that is right, the twelve original units are no longer twelve. For a type this small, losing one building takes out a sixth of everything Eichler built in the form.

05 · How they trade

Priced as income, not as architecture.

The market runs these on rent multiples. That puts them at roughly 40 to 48 per cent of a renovated single-family Eichler's price per square foot — below even the Redwood City median per foot.

Property	Type	Price	Per sq ft
1135 Cedarwood Way	Atherwood house, 1,448 sf	$2,605,000	$1,799
Redwood City, all housing	Median, Jul 2026	$1,979,009	$1,150
393–395 Roble	Eichler duplex, 1,890 sf	$970,000	$513 [2015]
397–399 Roble	Eichler duplex	$910,000	$481 [2006]

There is no out-of-market comparison to make, because there are no Eichler duplexes anywhere else. Anyone quoting you a national or regional figure for "Eichler duplex values" has invented it.

06 · What you can actually do with one

R-2 is a better hand than most owners realise.

Conforming: R-2 zoning means these are legal duplexes, not nonconforming survivors. No use risk on sale.
SB 9: Does not apply. SB 9 reaches lots in single-family zones — so it bears on Atherwood, Fairwood and Sequoia Meadow, not on Roble Avenue.
ADUs: Redwood City permits multiple ADUs on multi-family property, including conversion of uninhabited space. Every one of these buildings has a central carport.

That carport is the interesting part. It is the defining architectural feature of the only duplexes Eichler built, and it is also the most obvious place to add a unit. Those two facts are in direct tension and an owner should decide deliberately which one they care about, rather than discovering the trade-off halfway through a permit set.

Two things we would check before anyone plans anything: whether either unit has been tenanted recently, which brings Costa-Hawkins and Redwood City tenant protections into play, and whether the parcel has ever been condo-mapped. As far as we can find, none of the five has ever been split for separate sale.

Talk to us

Own one of the five?

There are five of these buildings in the world and we have analysed them. If you own one — or you are looking at one — we can tell you what it is worth as architecture and what it is worth as income, which are not the same number.

He built duplexes once.