New Book: Present-Day Twist

Bay Area native Rob Keil loves diving head first with passion into producing book projects—especially those about architecture.

Now that 23 years have passed since the debut of Eichler: Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream, and 30 since Eichler Homes: Design for Living, Keil feels the world is ready to receive the third leg—this time focused on the 'now'—of what might be considered an Eichler book trilogy.

Tentatively titled Eichler Homes Today: from Midcentury to 21st Century, the 240-page coffee-table book is scheduled to be released in fall 2027. One of the author's goals is to show how extraordinary and relevant Eichler homes are today, nearly 70 years after they were built.

Readers, Keil says, will be taken on a photographic home tour of 25 homes with select floor plans, accompanied by a compelling narrative to owning and adapting an Eichler for today's lifestyle. But that's not all.

Partnering with photographer Rory Earnshaw, Keil's goal, he says, is to visually "give the reader the feeling of walking through the house as you would on a home tour…seeing what makes it an Eichler, and gaining that perspective and knowledge as you would if you had walked through the house in person."

In addition, Keil plans to cover a range of topics from 'what constitutes an Eichler,' to a discussion of the 'current obstacles for homeowners,' to 'how to deal with restoring your home.'

"Most books I've worked on have taken three years to do, and I already have a year in on this one," Keil says. His goal is to create an Eichler tome that is "very visual—as opposed to a text-heavy book—featuring 200 photographs, the vast majority of which will be in color."

An advertising art director and filmmaker during the week, Keil grew up in Pacifica and attended college in San Francisco. Today, Keil enjoys living the modern lifestyle in a 1962 San Bruno home that, he says, is every bit an Eichler in architectural appearance and décor.

"I'm a true Bay Area native," says Keil, whose previous architecture book was 'Little Boxes,' on Henry Doelger's Westlake homes. "My wife and son and I live in the Monte Verde neighborhood in San Bruno, in a very accurate reproduction of an Eichler."

Homes in Keil's neighborhood were built by Henry Stoneson, the builder of Stonestown in San Francisco. "The only [Eichler-like] thing our home doesn't have is radiant heating," he says. "But in every other regard—slab foundation, flat roof, atrium in the middle, post and beam—it's an extremely good copy of an Eichler. And maybe one-third to one-fourth of the houses here are also 'Likelers.'"