Terra Linda, the valley of flat-roofed, glass-walled houses north of San Rafael, is where the developer Joseph Eichler put his principles on the line in 1955 by selling a house to a Black family. The land was the Freitas family's dairy ranch, sold in 1953 and approved for the largest subdivision in Marin's history, and Rose Constance, one of the Freitas daughters, gave it the Portuguese name meaning beautiful land. Eichler built about 900 homes there between 1955 and 1965, on concrete slabs with radiant heating in the floor, open-beam ceilings and walls of glass turned toward private atriums and gardens, the modern design that has made an Eichler sought after ever since. When neighbours objected to his Black buyers, Eichler went door to door offering to buy their houses back. Nobody accepted, and nobody sold afterwards. By 1964, by Ned Eichler's own account, the company had sold thirty to forty homes to Black families at a time when most builders would not sell one. Eichler had made non-discrimination company policy years earlier, and in 1958, after a Sacramento court ruled that builders could not discriminate and the National Association of Home Builders declined to support the principle, he resigned from the association publicly. His company built more than 11,000 houses in California between 1949 and its bankruptcy in 1967. Marin has about 1,600 Eichlers in six tracts. Beyond Terra Linda they run up Lucas Valley Road through Marinwood, where the streets are named for berries, to Upper Lucas Valley, where Claude Oakland designed the steep double-gabled atrium models of 1962 to 1966.
Getting there
37.9991, -122.5506
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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