Stand at the sink of an Eichler that nobody has remodeled and the first thing you notice is how little kitchen there is. A short run of laminate counter. A few plywood cabinets with sliding doors and no handles. A cooktop, a wall oven, and a small table fixed to the counter that swings out into the room when it is wanted and back out of the way when it is not.

The second thing you notice is that you can see everything from there: the family room, the wall of glass, the yard beyond it. That was the whole idea. It is also the part that sixty years of imitation has mostly left behind.

A small room with a big job

Joseph Eichler was a builder, not an architect. After living for a time in Frank Lloyd Wright's Bazett house in Hillsborough, he decided that ordinary buyers should have modern houses too, and he hired real architects to design them: Anshen & Allen first, then Jones & Emmons and Claude Oakland. By the time he died in 1974 his companies had put up about 11,000 houses in California, most of them around San Francisco Bay. They shared a kit of parts: post-and-beam framing left exposed, a concrete slab with radiant heat running through it, Philippine mahogany paneling, and glass from floor to ceiling.

The kitchen in those houses was a compact galley, and it was open. Dave Weinstein, who writes about Eichler history for the Eichler Network, credits Eichler with doing as much as any builder to popularize the open-plan kitchen. The company's own sales copy, which Weinstein quotes, made the pitch directly: "From the world's most efficient, most beautiful kitchen, you can serve meals directly to the dining area, the multi-purpose room, or the outdoor dining area."

That openness had a purpose beyond convenience. The design historian Juliana Rowan Barton, who wrote her dissertation on the model kitchens of the period, has described how placing the kitchen and its counter front and center turned it into the home's "command center," a place to supervise a household from rather than a back room to disappear into. Whatever one makes of the gender politics of 1955, the planning logic is plain. The cook faces the room, and the room faces the garden.

What was actually in it

Very little, and none of it expensive. The same sales copy promised "a built-in Thermador range and oven, Waste King dishwasher and garbage disposer." Eichler Homes also boasted of "patented kitchen cabinets with removable sliding doors and no hardware to polish or clean."

Those cabinets are the heart of the matter. The boxes were plywood. The doors were thin hardboard sliders, about a quarter of an inch thick by one owner's measurement, with recessed finger holes where a handle would otherwise be. Many were finished in Zolatone, a speckled, multicolored lacquer that gave them a faintly industrial look.

Dane Henas, who restored the kitchen of his 1955 Sacramento Eichler, described them to Atomic Ranch without sentiment. "They were made of really cheap plywood, with recessed finger holes in the Masonite sliders and no hardware," he said. The finish was doing a second job: "The Zolatone covers up that these are the cheapest plywood cabinets imaginable—it filled in splits and gaps." He meant it as praise. The cabinets, he said, "were really minimal, pretty unique and go with the aesthetic of the house."

Around them were laminate counters set low, floors of linoleum or cork over the heated slab, and globe lights hanging on rigid stems. At the showpiece end of the range was the X-100, the experimental steel house that Jones & Emmons designed for Eichler in the San Mateo Highlands in 1956. Some 150,000 people came through it in three months to see, among other things, a cooktop that could disappear beneath a sliding table.

What everybody copies

Three things, and they are now so ordinary that it is hard to remember they were ever new. The kitchen is open to the living space. There is a counter with stools at it. The cabinet fronts are flat.

Weinstein catches how strange the second of those once seemed: "What a change to have a peninsula along the open kitchen, where family members could pull up a bar stool and have breakfast ad hoc." Walk into almost any house built or remodeled in the past twenty years and you will find some version of all three. In that sense the Eichler kitchen won.

What nobody gets right

The trouble is that those three features were never the point. They were the consequences of a kitchen that was small, thin and low, in a house that was mostly glass. Copy the features without those conditions and you get something else.

The size. The original was a galley because a galley is efficient, and because a small kitchen leaves the rest of the room alone. The modern version of an open kitchen is usually twice the size and anchored by an island as big as a dining table. It is open in the sense that it has no walls. It is not open in the sense that you can see past it.

The thinness. A quarter-inch sliding panel with a finger hole reads as a flat plane. A thick slab door with a bar pull reads as a piece of cabinetry. Multiply that by twenty doors and the kitchen stops being background and becomes the subject of the room.

The low line. Nothing in the original stood between the cook and the glass. Remodels tend to add exactly the things that do: upper cabinets over the peninsula, a tall refrigerator at the end of the run, a range hood hanging at eye level. The hood is the hard one. Ron Key, whose firm remodels Eichlers, has told the Eichler Network that the majority of his kitchen clients dislike their original exhaust fans, which are small and mounted in the ceiling. The fix is reasonable. Where it gets hung often is not.

The modesty. Each decade has had its own way of dressing the kitchen up. One Eichler featured in Atomic Ranch had been refitted with raised-panel oak cabinets, brass pulls and vinyl flooring printed to look like red brick. Today's equivalent is quieter but comes from the same impulse: heavily veined stone, statement pendants, a backsplash meant to be noticed. The original materials were plain on purpose, because the garden was supposed to be the thing you looked at.

The table. Almost nobody rebuilds the swing-out table. It was the cleverest thing in the room, a breakfast table that took up floor space only while someone was eating at it, and it is usually the first thing to go.

Why it is harder than it looks

In fairness to everyone who has tried, the original was not a good kitchen by current standards. An Eichler Network feature on cabinetry calls those kitchens "modest and cost conscious" and says flatly that they "could in no way stand up to the demands of today's living, breathing kitchens." There is not enough storage, not enough counter, and nowhere to put the appliances a household now owns.

The house fights back, too. "Eichler homes have restrictions that other homes do not," the kitchen designer Chris Chidester told the Eichler Network, adding that "you just cannot drill into the floors and ceilings." There is no crawl space and no attic. Heating pipes run through the slab, and the ceiling is the underside of the roof. Bringing in gas for a range can mean running the line over the roof or under the eaves. A plan that would be routine in a conventional house can be expensive or impossible here.

The ones that come close

The remodels that work tend to start from the same decision: keep the kitchen subordinate to the house.

Henas took the purist route. He kept the original cabinets and resprayed them in Zolatone, which he tracked down at an automotive paint supplier. He laid new Formica counters in a linen-weave pattern, repaired the original Thermador oven and added a modern gas cooktop. Jon and Gayle Jarrett, the owners of the house with the oak and the brick-look vinyl, gutted the room and went back to a galley plan drawn from their Anshen & Allen blueprints, with round finger-hole cabinet pulls that Jon Jarrett machined himself. "I wanted Formica countertops and cabinets, that whole midcentury look," he told Atomic Ranch.

Others change more and still hold the line. In a San Jose Eichler published by Houzz, the designer Pamela Lin of Urbanism Designs moved the kitchen and added a large island, which is not a purist's move. But the cabinet fronts are plain walnut with no hardware at all, the refrigerator opens with a push, and the original globe lights went back up. "Original Eichler kitchens had little or no hardware on their cabinets," Lin said. That one observation carried most of the design.

If you are about to remodel one

Start with the plan, not the finishes. Decide where the cook stands and what that person can see, and protect that view before choosing a single material.

Keep the fronts flat and leave the hardware off. Finger pulls, edge pulls and push latches all do the job. Keep anything tall, including the refrigerator and the hood, out of the line between the counter and the glass.

Hire people who have worked on these houses before. The slab, the radiant heat and the roof change what is possible, and an old floor should be tested for asbestos before anyone disturbs it.

And if the original cabinets are still there, think twice before they go in the dumpster. Henas noted that most owners took theirs out long ago. Original cabinets, swing-out tables and Thermador cooktops still turn up for sale among Eichler owners, which says something about how many people have come to wish they had kept theirs.

The kitchen Eichler's architects drew was cheap, small and nearly invisible. That was not a shortcoming to be corrected. It was the design.