270 Kilkare Road

Kilkare Road began as Bachelder Road, the ranch track of Thomas Foxwell Bachelder, the farmer whose 1884 land sale founded much of Sunol and whose stone barn of 1888 still stands further up the road, on the National Register since 1994. The creek alongside it was Bachelder Creek before it was Sinbad.

In 1925 Charles Henry Crocker improved that old ranch road through the narrow canyon with his wife Carlotta. Crocker was the grandson of Charles Crocker of railroad fame, but his own money came from H.S. Crocker, his father's San Francisco printing and stationery house, and from banking. He bought the land at the head of the canyon in May 1926, subdivided it the following year, and built 101 half-log summer cabins, each with a main room, wood casement windows and French doors onto a deck above the creek, let to San Franciscans who arrived by train. The Pleasanton Times of 30 August 1929 recorded a concrete swimming pool, two clubhouses for dancing, hiking trails and a game sanctuary. The road has carried the name of his development ever since.

County records date this house to 1925, the year the road was improved and a year before Crocker bought the tract above it, which places it on the older, lower reach of the canyon rather than in the cabin colony. It stands behind a private gate, across a bridge over Sinbad Creek, on 5.22 acres.

Hardwood floors, a bay window, milled trim, and a gas fireplace set in a marble surround. The kitchen runs marble counters, Miele appliances and a French La Cornue range. Four bedrooms and four baths in the main house, with a fifth bedroom and bath in a suite that has its own entrance, 3,280 square feet across the two.

The five acres are worked: stone pathways, fountains, a garden gazebo, a pergola over the swim spa, a two-stall New England barn of more than 600 square feet with a tack room, a gym cottage, a playhouse and a two-car garage. Regional parkland climbs the ridge from the property line, 5,271 acres of Pleasanton Ridge on one side and the 6,850 acres of the Sunol Regional Wilderness over the hill.

The neighbours on the lower road are the Little Brown Church, on its site since 1885, and Elliston, the 17-room blue sandstone house Henry Hiram Ellis raised between 1885 and 1890 from a Niles Canyon quarry, now a National Register vineyard estate. A few minutes the other way, at the foot of the same valley, Willis Polk's twelve-column water temple of 1910 still stands over the place where three underground streams meet.

If you would like to submit your property to The Full Ask, please visit our submissions page. Featured properties are introduced to our community of agents, designers, and buyers who care about well-considered real estate.