June 17 Bay Area Home Tour

Five sparkling-fresh residences are the headliners of this weekend's Silicon Valley Modern Home Tour set for Saturday June 17. Last-minute tickets are still available.

The tour is the latest installment of an annual event that has helped introduce many Bay Area residents not just to modernism, but to the concept of home touring itself.

"I remember a couple years ago having to explain to people what a home tour was," says Ken Shallcross, vice-president of Austin-based Modern Architecture + Design Society, which is promoting Saturday's tour. "I feel like the idea of home tours is much more prevalent now…Now, it's a little easier to approach people."

"It actually started with a tour in Austin, Texas," he said of the seven-year-old company, which changed name last year from Modern Home Tours. "The home tours are still our main focus…[but] we didn't want to be just a touring company."

Now organizing and promoting tours in more than a half-dozen metropolitan areas, the company staged its first Silicon Valley modern tour in 2011. This self-guided tour remains one of their most popular due to the ever-present local interest in modernism and increasing number of homeowners and builders willing to share their work with the public.

The Bay Area tour has been in the valley every year but one. When they tried the East Bay one year, it was too difficult to recruit homes for the tour.

"Silicon Valley, there's always somebody who wants to participate," said Shallcross, noting that this year's tour includes homes in Cupertino, Hillsborough, Los Altos Hills, San Carlos and a reimagined Eichler in Palo Alto.

One of the motives behind the name change was finding beautifully modern homes on the outskirts of a locale.

"We really just can't send people two hours out of their way," said Shallcross, explaining that instead, they post those homes on their website but leave them off the tour.

The Eichler on this year's tour is a five-bedroom, four-bath house (1954) in the Greenmeadow tract that was renovated by San Francisco-based M110 Architecture.