Eichler Mania Spreads to Michigan

What’s an Eichler fan to do in Michigan, a state rich in beauty but absolutely lacking any Eichler homes? One fan has a solution – he collects Eichler brochures.

“The houses are just really, really cool. They’re fascinating,” says Andy Schulist, a man in his 30s who sells real estate and oversees rental properties with his dad when he’s not collecting.

Schulist, who has never seen a real Eichler home, recently added two original Eichler sales brochures to his collection, one for Greenmeadow in Palo Alto. They cost him $85 on eBay. “They’re not cheap,” he notes.

His Eichler collecting began “a while back” when he spotted one brochure while trolling the Internet for mid-century modern collectables. Besides Eichler ephemera, Schulist collets many things, including roadside signs, neon, a weather vane from the roof of  an old Howard Johnson restaurant, and a lighted ‘Howard Johnson ice cream 28 flavors’ sign.

“I’ve got a lot of weird stuff,” he says. “It’s not just the brochures.”

“It’s like a museum,” he says of his single-story, post-and-beam house from 1965. “My friend says, oh, you should charge admission.”

That first brochure got him reading about Eichler, and his interest grew. He was impressed with Eichler’s commitment to building modern homes for everyday people, with the beauty of the homes, and with Eichler’s willingness to sell to minorities.

While Farmington Hills and nearby areas do have modern homes – Schulist owns one – he notes they were not built for everyday buyers.

He oversees a Facebook page about modernism in and around Detroit.

Today his collection has grown to a dozen or so original brochures, either for individual Eichler neighborhoods, or brochures laying out the various floor plans. He also owns various other bits of Eichler ephemera, including a magazine on Eichler’s “Project X.” Plus he owns a brochure for a Cliff May-designed tract.

He had his first Eichler brochure laminated and hung it on the wall. But, realizing that meant he couldn’t read through it that way, later ones are stored in a plastic container.

Stoking his interest in the brochures, he says, is his background in the homebuilding field. His father is a homebuilder, and Schulist says he has been around construction all his life. He notes that his father gives buyers of his houses sales brochures – and they are almost immediately tossed out.

He imagines that’s why Eichler brochures are so hard to come by. “There just aren’t that many out there,” he says.

“I’ve seem them go cheap, for $40,” he says, though he usually pays $100 to $140 on eBay, usually at auction. Recently he lost a bidding war when the price went north of $160. “The auction, it gets heated at the last minute,” he says.

Schulist is so much a fan of mid-century modern houses that he’s tried to get his father to “build a neighborhood of Eichler-style homes.”

This, despite his father’s vain attempt to prevent his son from buying a modern home for himself. “He said, 'You don’t want a house like this in Michigan. It’s bad for energy use.' My father builds energy-efficient houses.”

But, Schulist says, “New houses don’t do it for me. They’re well built, they’re energy efficient. But they don’t have a lot of personality.”

Not surprisingly, his dad declined to become the Joe Eichler of the greater Detroit vicinity.

“He said, I don’t know if there’s enough of a market for it. I said, you’d be the only person here doing it.”

As a side career, Schulist buys and sells mid-century modern furnishings, often finding items by “junking,” and generally selling using eBay, Etsy and Craigslist. He does well.

“There are lots of baby boomers who love this stuff and want it, also young people like me. People are really paying good money for it.”

He doesn’t sell any of his Eichler brochures, though. “I keep them.” And he keeps collecting.

“At some point if the prices go up crazy, I may have to stop. But as long as I can find them and have the funds, I’ll keep buying them.”

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