■F E ATU R E STO RYB O A R D
Call of the canopy
Story: Dave Weinstein Photography: Sabrina Huang
On one tree-covered block in Redwood City stand 28 Eichler homes in two straight lines. It’s not a spectacular block, though several of the street trees, green year round with limbs that reach for the sky and arch over the road, certainly are spectacular. “People love them,” neighbor Christine Bahr says of the camphor trees.
Their magnificent trees attract attention—but it’s the friendships that make Lyons Street so special
STREET OF FRIENDS. When the Eichler Network visited Redwood City’s Lyons Street recently, its curious Eichler neighbors came out to gather under the camphor trees. 8 CAMODERN
“People come down this street just to come down this street.” Not spectacular either are the houses, small and simple, built early in Joe Eichler’s career, without the steep, dramatic gables seen in so many of his later homes. Still, it’s a street that once seen is hard to forget. Mary and Roger Bowie certainly couldn’t, when they first discovered Lyons Street on a recreational bike ride more than 20 years ago. Nor could James Kim, when he similarly came upon the place while walking for exercise 16 years later. Mary, an artist, and Roger, a banker, weren’t bowled over simply because these were Eichlers. They were already living in an Eichler townhouse in Palo Alto. What got them was the quiet harmony of the street. “We went, ‘Oh, my gosh, could you imagine if we ever got to buy a house on this street!’” Mary recalls. “It was our dream street!” When a house in the neighborhood, which was originally called ‘Fairwood’ but is known today simply as ‘Lyons Street,’ came up for sale, the Bowies bid—as did at least 15 others, she says. But the Bowies won. “We ended up getting it on our dream street!” “It was wow, Kismet, the way it worked out,” Roger says. James Kim, a project manager for a tech firm, who was living in a Redwood City rental 30 minutes away, often took long walks on random routes. “I was walking to [Red] Morton Park, listening to music,” he says. “I turned the corner and wound up on Lyons Street. I went home and said to my wife, you have to see this block.” “We’re both fans of mid-century modern. It was exciting to find Eichlers here. We didn’t know about these,” he says. His wife, Lea Ann Hutter, says, “We’re big neighborhood walkers. This became a favorite block of ours.”