No attic, at all
A flat or low-slope roof sits directly on the beams. There is no void above the ceiling, which means there is nowhere for a duct to run, no platform for an air handler and no route between rooms.
Mountain View · Mid-Peninsula
Great houses. Terrible places to put a duct.
Flat roofs, exposed beams, glass walls, heat cast into the floor slab. We do ordinary Peninsula houses too — but the mid-century ones are why people call.
- Positions agreed before we quote
- Nothing cut into a beam ceiling
The ceiling is the finish In a post-and-beam house there is nothing above it to hide anything in.
The mid-century problem
Four features that make these houses beautiful, and difficult
Every one of them is a deliberate design decision from 1958 that a modern HVAC catalogue has no answer for.
Heat in the floor
Original heating is hydronic radiant tubing cast into the concrete slab. Quiet, even, and completely unable to cool. After sixty years it is also the part most likely to have failed.
Walls made of glass
Floor-to-ceiling glazing, often still single pane, facing a courtyard. Enormous solar gain on a west elevation in August and a serious heat loss on a January night.
Open plan, no returns
Rooms flow into each other and the bedrooms sit on a corridor. Air moves beautifully through the living space and barely at all into the rooms people sleep in.
What that means in practice
The equipment is the easy part
On a conventional house, a replacement is largely a matter of specification: size it, order it, fit it. On a post-and-beam house the specification is straightforward and everything else is not.
Where does the indoor unit go so the room still reads as the architect drew it? Which wall can carry a line set without crossing a glass wall? Can the condenser sit somewhere it will not be heard through a single pane of glass three metres away?
Those questions get answered on a walk-through, with you, before anybody quotes anything. That is why the first visit is called a design visit rather than an estimate.
A design visit covers
- Every room that needs conditioning, and the ones that do not
- Indoor unit positions marked and agreed with you
- Line-set routes drawn, including what will be visible
- Condenser location, setback and sound
- The state of any existing radiant system
- Glazing, orientation and what that does to the load
What we do
Six services across the Peninsula
Mid-century is the speciality. It is not the limit — most of what we service is perfectly ordinary.
AC repair
Not cooling, short cycling, icing up, tripping a breaker. Diagnosed on readings before a part is quoted, on any type of house.
Ductless & small-duct
Wall, cassette and slim ducted systems for houses with nowhere to put conventional ductwork. Our most common project by a distance.
Eichler & mid-century
Design visits, radiant assessment, and cooling put into a post-and-beam house without wrecking what makes it worth owning.
Heating & heat pumps
Furnace service and replacement, plus heat-pump conversions — which on the Peninsula cover winter comfortably and cool in summer as well.
Ductwork
Testing, sealing, replacement and returns that are big enough — for the ranch and two-storey houses that do have ducting.
Maintenance
A yearly visit, with the readings written down, so the second year's numbers mean something next to the first year's.
Load, not square footage
Why these houses get sized wrong
A rule-of-thumb sizing based on floor area will be badly wrong in a house that is one-third glass. Solar gain through a west-facing glass wall is an enormous afternoon load in a small room, and nothing in the square footage tells you that.
Equally, a house with a concrete slab has real thermal mass, which flattens the peaks and changes how the system should be run. Sized and set up correctly, these houses are genuinely comfortable. Sized off a rule of thumb, they are either freezing in the morning or hopeless by five.
- Orientation and glazing area measured, not estimated
- Room-by-room load, because one room can dominate
- Slab mass taken into account in how it is scheduled
How a job runs
Design first, price second
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Walk the house
Every room, the roof line, the glazing, the slab, the side yards. Photographs as we go.
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Agree positions
Indoor units, line-set routes and the condenser, marked and agreed with you before any number exists.
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A written proposal
What goes where, what it costs, what will be visible afterwards. Options where there are genuinely options.
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Installed and finished
Covers painted to match, penetrations sealed, permit closed, and the house left as it was found.
Why us
We care what it looks like afterwards
Plenty of contractors will fit a mini-split in an Eichler. Fewer will spend the first hour arguing with themselves about which wall it should go on, or refuse to run a line set diagonally across the front elevation because it would be quicker.
Nobody here earns commission on equipment. The person who walks the house is the person who installs it.
Where we work
Mountain View and the towns either side
We are on Grant Road, which puts Los Altos, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Cupertino within fifteen or twenty minutes. The mid-century tracts we know best are spread across Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto and Los Altos.
- Mountain View
- Los Altos
- Los Altos Hills
- Palo Alto
- Sunnyvale
- Cupertino
- Santa Clara
- Menlo Park
- Atherton
- Portola Valley
- Stanford
- East Palo Alto
- Saratoga
- Campbell
- Redwood City
Questions
The ones we get asked most
Can you put air conditioning in an Eichler?
Yes, and it is most of what we do. The original houses have no attic, no duct space and an exposed tongue-and-groove ceiling nobody wants to cut into, so conventional central air is not the answer. A ductless or small-duct system placed carefully is, and where the equipment goes is as much a design decision as a technical one.
My radiant slab has stopped heating. Is it repairable?
Sometimes. Original radiant systems used copper tubing cast into the slab, and after sixty years leaks and blockages are common. A leak can occasionally be isolated and bypassed, but once several loops have failed the honest answer is that the slab is not economically repairable, and the conversation turns to what replaces it.
Will the indoor unit ruin the look of the room?
It does not have to. There are wall, ceiling-cassette, low-wall and slim ducted options, and the difference between a good installation and a bad one is where they go and how the line set is routed. We walk the house and agree the positions with you before anything is quoted, because in a mid-century house that decision is the job.
Do you work on ordinary houses too?
Of course. Most of the Peninsula is ranch houses, two-storeys and townhouses with perfectly normal ducted systems, and we repair, replace and maintain those every week. The mid-century work is a speciality, not a restriction.
Do you pull permits?
Yes. Equipment changeouts in California generally require a permit and Title 24 documentation, and Mountain View, Palo Alto and Los Altos all inspect. We pull the permit, schedule the inspection and hand over the closed permit with the job.
Book a design visit
Free, no obligation, and you get the positions marked whether you use us or not.