No Rules for Lights on Eichler Homes

Upper Lucas Valley has some of the tightest architectural controls of any Eichler neighborhoods. But when it comes to holiday lights – anything goes!

“Ha! No,” Mark Neely responded when asked if the architectural guidelines that control colors, fences, and exterior changes to homes have any effect on holiday displays. Neely chairs the Marin County neighborhood’s Architectural Review Committee.

“We don't have an official review of lights.  Homeowners are free to create their own unique artistic statements.”

Good thing too, because while Upper Lucas Valley’s architectural controls have kept the neighborhood largely intact and beautiful, the wide variety in holiday displays adds to the fun of exploring modern neighborhoods at Christmas time.

"The Eichlers look great lit up for the holidays,” Neely said.  “The lights really enhance the structural elements that define each model. It's especially interesting to see the geometric shapes of our modern rooflines featured at night in the Lucas Valley Homeowners Association community, where normally we have a full dark sky and no streetlights.”

Eichler Network recently cruised through two Eichler neighborhoods in Marin – Upper Lucas valley and the adjacent Marinwood subdivision, and Greenridge in Castro Valley, to take in the lights.

Some streets remained quiet and dark in early December – others bloomed with lights. Most streets were simply dotted here and there with displays, which ranged from the ornate to the tasteful – modern simplicity, you might say.

One of the grandest home displays involves two neighboring homes on Mt. Shasta Court in Upper Lucas Valley. Here, a lively display fills two front yards.

For years the owners of one of those homes, Tad Jacobs, put on a Christmas display and festivities at the neighborhood’s community center, featuring a lighted tree, a fire truck to awe the kids, hot chocolate, and of course a visit from Santa.

But he dropped it this year, Jacobs said, in part because his kids had grown.

The two-home display, he says, is especially nice because the neighbors who shares the display have children who enjoy it.

“We will not have our huge redwood lit this year because the homeowner who voluntarily did that every year is no longer doing it,” said Janice Cunningham, the business manager for the Lucas Valley Homeowners Association.  “So we have scrambled to get something together for this year in the last week.”

“We have our lights up,” she reported a few days later, “colored lights across the building and falling snow lights in the oak tree over the clubhouse.”

The neighborhood celebrated with a small tree lighting and a visit from the man with the beard.

“On Christmas Eve,” she said, just a bit before 6 p.m., “many homes light luminaria.  This is a candle in a paper bag and they are placed along the curbs. When all the houses on a street participate it is beautiful!”

The best streets to catch a sighting of luminaria, she says, are  Mt. Tenaya Drive and Mt. Palomar Court. 

Wally Field, the longtime Eichler fanatic who calls himself the “Eichlerholic,” always posts on Eichler Network’ Chatterbox Lounge “my yearly suggestion to owners with  obscure glass to consider putting their lights BEHIND the obscure glass.  I saw this in a family friend's Eichler as a kid, and the optical effects are incredible.

"Close to the glass, the lights produce tiny, bright, crystalline halos. Increase the distance, and the halos become dimmer but larger, often intersecting and creating great color mixing effects.  Increase the distance more, and the wires completely disappear, resulting in a zero-gravity, nebulous composition of huge, floating, intersecting blobs.

“Finally, the most amazing thing is how the composition looks like in motion, to the innocent onlooker walking or driving by.”

“I wish more people would put them up actually,” Neely said of holiday lights. “I grew up in the Midwest, where nearly every home had some sort of lights up during the Christmas season.”

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