House observation

This real estate listing has a story to tell about what's happened to Sunnyvale this century. It's a corner house built in 1955, near the library; it may have been the outlier in a tract of large suburban houses across the street, or it may be left over from what was on the site of the city hall and offices that were put in starting in the 1970s. It used to have a lawn that the homeowner fussed over every day, square-cut hedges on both sides of the front path, a group of trees and tall hedges making a privacy screen for the driveway-side door, and a tremendous cedar in the back yard cut in an oblong shape that loomed over the back fence like a ship's hull. (Here's the side of the house in May 2015, at the same time as the former county employment training office next door was opening as a Montessori school.) After the owner died or left, the lawn became tatty, then builders moved in and gutted the interior. It was put up for sale in early 2016 with a glitzed-up interior, advertised at 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, and 2275 sq. ft., with a separate suite by the garage that could be used for a professional office. A fancy barbecue set-up was in the backyard. It sold for $1,700,000 and almost immediately, the tall conifer in the privacy plantings collapsed from neglect, falling across the sidewalk at the corner and opening up a clear view of the side door. Eventually another hedge bush was put in the gap. For a while, whenever I passed by I was cheered by the sight of a little orange Fiat electric car in the driveway or the street, but the house didn't look looked after.

Then in summer 2019 the lawn got ripped out (admittedly, Street View shows people had been cutting across it at the corner) and replaced with little fruit trees in a sea of wood chips, with a blocky picket fence around the whole front, set back from the sidewalk so that the front yard effectively shrank. By the start of that year, the corner house across the kind of busy street, which used to have an impressive garden of cacti and ornamental trees making interesting use of a rather small front yard, had been renovated to be huge (the garage became rooms and a new garage went in where yard had been) and lost most of the cactus garden to a new fenced side patio to offset the loss of the back yard. The people who bought it immediately removed the last cactus, or it died, so now there's just one palm plant.

Now the 1955 house has been put up for sale again with an asking price of $2,398,000, listed as 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, and 2,676 sq. ft. An extension has been added where the cedar tree was, leaving a tiny back lawn. The city crossed the line some time ago into million-dollar prices becoming normal, and there's been gut-renovating to create open-plan living spaces, additional and larger bathrooms, and fancy kitchens for a while alongside the straightforward demolition and replacement (sometimes coyly reusing the original facade, or something that can be presented as the original facade, presumably to get around planning rules). But five years ago's luxury is today's not good enough; five years ago's "expansive house with suite with separate access suitable for professional use" has given way to today's "executive home with suite suitable for home office" (I wonder what the glass door with the little room behind it set up with a day bed is intended to suggest, too; imprison your toddler in a sound-proof cage while you work?), and the houses are now made so big there's no room for "outdoor rooms" even though one of the huge advantages last year to living in a house in this beautiful climate was getting outside into the yard; we're back to little patios like in houses that were squeezed onto too-small lots in the first place. I hope the new owners are weirdoes enough to harvest their fruit.

Update: Sold for $3m on June 11.

( The kerb strip of mostly yellow and a few pink flowering succulents has remained the same for all this time. )