Both founding firms, on one small tract.

For most of the decade every Eichler in California came from one of two offices: Anshen & Allen, or Jones & Emmons. On a tract of six hundred houses you would expect to find both. On a tract of fifteen, finding both is genuinely unusual, and it means the houses on these four streets are not variations of one plan — they are two different design sensibilities a few doors apart.

That is a real thing for a buyer to understand and a real thing for a seller to establish. Which office drew your house changes what it is, and it changes which archive holds the drawings.

This matters practically, because the paper trail is not symmetrical. Jones & Emmons material survives — UCLA holds the A. Quincy Jones papers, and plans can be requested. For Anshen & Allen there is no real archive at all; the early files from that office have disappeared.

So an Oakdell Park house designed by Jones & Emmons can very often be traced to its original drawings. One by Anshen & Allen frequently cannot, and the evidence has to be assembled from the house itself, the city's permit file and whatever the original owners kept.

We wrote up the whole process — which archive holds what, who to contact, what to ask for — on a separate page.

Olive Street, Oakdell Street, Magnolia Court and Middle Court. Two of those are courts, which is part of why the tract reads as smaller than it is and why several of the houses are invisible unless you drive in.

It also means transaction data here is thin. A tract of fifteen produces very few sales, and in some years none at all, which is why an automated estimate on one of these houses is close to meaningless.

Oakdell Park came to market in April 1952 at $25,000 to $29,500, on quarter-acre lots, with cul-de-sac planning, fenced private yards, two bathrooms and master bedrooms with dressing rooms. For 1952 that is not a starter house — it is a considered, fairly expensive product aimed at buyers who had a choice.

That matters for how the tract reads today. These were not minimum-cost houses that happened to get good architecture; the plans were generous from the outset, and the ones that have not been chopped about still feel it.

Eichler Network makes an observation about this tract that is worth repeating: the Eichlers are such a small part of the surrounding Menlo Park neighbourhood that most current residents are not aware the name Oakdell Park refers to anything. The tract has effectively dissolved into the city around it. That anonymity is precisely why houses here get mislisted, and why owners often do not know what they have.