Palo Alto · Santa Clara County
The city where the back of the house is a wall of glass.
Palo Alto has roughly 2,700 Eichler houses across 31 tracts. On most of them the front door is not the way people actually come and go.
Eichlers, and why they are their own job
The City adopted its own Eichler Design Guidelines in April 2018, by Council resolution. They count 31 Eichler tracts built between 1949 and 1974, from University Gardens through to the Los Arboles Addition, with the last Palo Alto Eichler finished on Guinda Street in 1975.
The adopted guidelines describe the form precisely, and every line of it matters to a locksmith. Post and beam construction on a concrete slab. Full height glazing at the rear, with the rear entry doors "typically fully glazed aluminum sliding doors set within these window walls". Floor plans built around a center atrium or a rear patio. And at the street, minimal front façade glazing, usually clerestory windows and a few punched openings.
So the real entrance is a sliding aluminum door at the back, often onto an atrium that is itself inside the house. That is not a door you treat like a front door. Sliding patio doors fail by being lifted off the track rather than picked, the original aluminum frames are soft, and the replacement hardware that fits a 1955 Eichler slider is not what a hardware store will hand you.
The slab matters too. There is no crawl space and no basement, so an Eichler has fewer ways in than it looks like it has. People assume all that glass makes the house easy. It does not make it easy, it makes it fragile, which is a different problem.
City of Palo Alto Eichler Design Guidelines, adopted 2 April 2018 by Resolution 9748. Quoted fragments are exact.
Four historic districts, and what they mean for your hardware
Palo Alto Planning states that the city contains four historic districts listed in the National Register: Professorville, the Ramona Street Architectural District, Green Gables and Greenmeadow. Professorville and Ramona Street are also in the Palo Alto Historic Inventory, and Professorville has a locally designated extension that is not federally listed.
Two of those four are Eichler tracts. Green Gables was built in 1950 to 1951 and Greenmeadow in 1954 to 1955, and both are on the National Register as districts.
There is a trap in this that catches people out. California Civil Code 1941.3 requires a landlord to fit a deadbolt on a rental's main entry, and subdivision (f) switches that duty off for a building designated as a historical structure. If you rent out a house in one of these districts, work out which rules you are actually under before you change anything, because the answer is not the same as it is three streets away.
City of Palo Alto Planning and Development Services on the city's historic districts; California Civil Code §1941.3(f).
A city that was mostly finished by 1970
Palo Alto had 21,338 housing units in 1970 and about 26,150 in 2020. Fewer than five thousand net units in fifty years. The City's own Consolidated Plan states that 79 percent of housing units were constructed before 1980.
The mix: single family detached 56.6 percent, single family attached 4.2 percent, two to four units 6.6 percent, and 32.3 percent in buildings of five units or more. Tenure has barely moved in twenty years, sitting at 56 percent owner and 44 percent renter since 2000.
For a locksmith that adds up to one thing: almost nothing here is new. The hardware on a Palo Alto door is either original, or it is whatever somebody fitted over it in the decades since, and frequently both at once on the same door.
City of Palo Alto 2015–2023 and 2023–2031 Housing Elements; Consolidated Plan FY 2015–2020.
Where we go in Palo Alto
Old Palo Alto, Professorville and University South, Downtown North, Crescent Park, Duveneck and St Francis, Community Center, College Terrace, Evergreen Park, Southgate, Ventura, Mayfield, Barron Park, Green Acres, Greenmeadow and Walnut Grove, Greendell, Fairmeadow, Charleston Meadows, Charleston Gardens, Midtown, Palo Verde, Triple El, Monroe Park, Meadow Park, Adobe Meadow, Leland Manor, Palo Alto Orchards, Palo Alto Hills, Los Trancos Woods and the Sand Hill corridor.
In an emergency, 20 to 30 minutes. Palo Alto is the far end of our range, so if it is not urgent we would rather book you a time and arrive when we said we would.
Questions people ask here
Can you secure an Eichler sliding door without ruining the look of it?
Usually yes. The two things that matter are taking the vertical play out so the panel cannot be lifted off its track, and adding a secondary lock that does not sit in the glass line. Send a photo of the door and the track on WhatsApp first.
I am locked out and the only unlocked door is into the atrium.
That happens constantly here. Tell us on the phone, because the atrium door and the street door are different jobs and it changes which one we work.
My house is in Professorville. Can I change the front door lock?
For your own hardware, in most cases yes. If you are altering the door itself, or you rent the property out, the historic designation changes the picture and it is worth a call to Planning before anyone touches it.
Do you cover Stanford?
The residential areas, yes. Campus buildings have their own facilities access and we are not going to get past that, nor should we.
Need a locksmith in Palo Alto now?
A person answers, at any hour, in English or Spanish. If it is not urgent, we will hold a day and a time for you instead.
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