Foster City · Neighborhood Four · through 1968
The last ones, with the outriggers.
Marina Point is the latest of the three. Its streets are nautical — Schooner, Barkentine, Yawl, Mainsail — and certain 1968 houses here carry a detail that appears nowhere else in the city.
Original owners moved in that year
Schooner · Barkentine · Yawl · Mainsail
240 Mainsail Court, 1,860 sq ft
01 · The outrigger beam ends
A Foster City detail, and a late one.
Eichler Network records that certain 1968 houses in Foster City retain what it calls tiki-like outrigger central beam-ends — the projecting beam tips cut and shaped rather than simply run out square.
It is a small thing and it is the kind of small thing that gets removed in a re-roof by somebody who does not know what they are looking at. If your house has them, they are original, they are unusual, and they should survive the next roof.
This is late work. Eichler Homes Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 1967 and J.L. Eichler and Associates carried the operation on. Whether the 1968 Foster City houses were completed under the original company or its successor is something we have not been able to establish from any source, and we are not going to assert it either way — but the timing is worth knowing if you own one.
The images below are illustrations, not photographs of Foster City houses. Each is labelled on its face. They are here to show the features described above — the things you check from the kerb — not to depict any particular house or address.
02 · Mainsail Court
The densest run of Eichlers in the city.
Mainsail Court holds one of the largest single concentrations of Eichlers anywhere in Foster City, with a section connected by pedestrian path to Ketch Park.
A verified example at 240 Mainsail Court: built 1967, 1,860 square feet, four bedrooms, two baths, single storey, two-car garage, on a 5,913 square foot lot — described in its own listing as an atrium plan with double gable roofs, a family kitchen and walls of glass.
That double-gable roof is worth noting. It is not the standard single low gable people picture, and it is part of why the Foster City houses read differently from the Peninsula tracts.
03 · The end of the line
1968, and then nothing.
Eichler built in Foster City from 1963 to 1968 and then stopped. The company went on to build Sereno Foothills at the end of the sixties and Bell Meadows in Mountain View into the early seventies, and Joseph Eichler died in July 1974.
So Marina Point is not the last Eichler work anywhere — but it is the last in this city, and it is late-middle-period rather than early. If you are trying to place a Foster City house in the arc of the whole operation, that is where it sits: begun near the company’s peak, finished through its bankruptcy.
What we can do for you
Things worth asking us for.
If you are trying to buy one
Roughly two hundred houses, and a handful trade in a good year.
Because Eichler was sold scattered lots here, there is no street to watch and no tract to farm. Buyers who get one are almost always the ones who were already on a list when it moved. Tell us what you are looking for — plan, bedrooms, atrium or gallery, how far you will stretch — and we will call you when something fits.
Before they list
Two hundred houses, none of them on an all-Eichler block.
Because Eichler was sold scattered lots here, there is no street to watch and no tract to farm — a listing can come and go without anyone who wanted it ever seeing it. We keep a list and we write to it only when something actually happens — no volume, no drip campaign.
Talk to us
Tell us your street.
If you own on Mainsail, Schooner, Barkentine or Yawl and your beam ends are shaped rather than cut square, you have something worth keeping. We would like to see it.
The other clusters