Fairhaven Tract

Fairhaven is a single Eichler tract, 140 homes on 39 acres laid out along eight streets and 1.16 miles of public street. Every lot inside the boundary is zoned for single family homes on 8,000 square feet and the median parcel measures 0.196 acres. The city's Eichler survey lists all 140 parcels here across sixteen distinct model designs, the LA-91 on 26 lots, the LJ-124 on 24 and the LJ-144 on 20.

The city describes these houses by their post and beam framing, floor to ceiling glass and interior atriums, with a street face kept private behind frosted glass and few outward windows while the back of the house opens completely to the yard. Flat and broad gable roofs run through all three Orange tracts and the shed roof appears here and in neither of the others. Orange designated Fairhaven a local historic district in 2019 and adopted design standards alongside it. The city's parcel record assigns 109 parcels here to Jordan Academy of Language and Computer Science and 32 to La Veta Elementary, then every parcel to Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

Fairhaven is the first of the three tracts Eichler built in Orange, and the first he built anywhere in Southern California. It went up in 1960, about 140 houses on roughly forty acres, worked out as variations on a handful of basic models. The company sold to any qualified buyer from its founding, at a time when other postwar builders were writing race restrictions into their deeds, and Eichler resigned publicly from the National Association of Home Builders in 1958 over its refusal to back a non-discrimination policy.

The street names stay in one register, the woods: Cedarwood, Fernwood, Oakwood, Kirkwood, Woodland and Larkstone, with Casselle and Fairhaven itself. Orange designated its three Eichler neighborhoods as local historic districts, which opened Mills Act tax agreements to owners who keep the houses to federal preservation standards, and in May 2019 the city's Eichler design standards won awards from both the American Planning Association and Docomomo US. The three tracts together hold nearly 350 houses and are the only work Eichler ever did in Orange County.