June 17 Bay Area Home Tour - Page 2

"Eichlers are unique in the world for having been built with visible solid redwood tongue-and-groove ceilings, which are also the roof structurally. This will never happen again," said M110's Mark Marcinik in an email interview. "In this house you will see redwood ceilings that have been painstakingly stripped of paint and restored to the natural redwood."

"I tend to work with the builders or the architect," Shallcross said of recruiting homes for the tours, which also occur regularly in Portland, Denver, Seattle, Austin, and a few other cities, including several in Texas. "We make sure they're there to discuss the home."

One thing Eichler owners may want to discuss at the Greenmeadow house is how "all the problems of radiant heating have been solved through new technology," according to Marcinik, who adds, "The zone system can provide comfort to any part of the house without the lag time of old systems, and provide precise control, which translates into enormous energy savings."

Only one house on this year's tour is currently for sale, but it's a doozy: a new, 11,000-square-foot mansion in Los Altos Hills with six beds and 8.5 baths. The home features modern design (by Swatt Miers Architects), multiple floor levels adding up to a panoramic view of the valley and, of course, a private vineyard. The asking? A cool $18 million.

For this year's homes, the architectural firms being represented, besides M110 and Swatt Miers, are Klopf Architecture, Aidlin Darling Design, and ANAV Design.

"I do a little research each year to find a couple more," the spokesman said of modernist architects. "Our tours usually have five to seven homes. We want to give people enough homes to see how to spend their dollar."

"I think it's a good representation of what our tours are generally about, because there's little bit of everything," he said of the 2017 Silicon Valley Modern Home Tour, which is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, June 17, with tickets running $35 online and $40 the day of the tour.

For more information or advance tickets, click here.