Inside Campbell homes
Small does not mean fast. A 950-square-foot bungalow off Campbell Avenue has the same number of bathrooms to scrub as a house twice the size, plus tighter corners, less counter to work from, and a kitchen where the refrigerator, the range and the sink sit within two steps of each other. Density of belongings, not floor area, sets the time. We price on rooms for exactly that reason.
The other half of the city is going up rather than out. Being fully built out, new housing arrives as infill: six-unit and twenty-unit townhome projects wedged onto parcels under an acre, three floors with the garage at ground level. Those units are all hard flooring and stairs, and the front door is often reached from a shared path rather than a street. San Tomas and the Dry Creek blocks keep the older pattern of single-story homes with driveways.
What we walk into in Campbell
The baseline is a single-story house of 950 to 1,500 square feet built between 1925 and 1965, on a modest flat lot, with one or two bathrooms and a detached or tuck-under garage. Many have been remodeled inside without gaining floor area. The newer townhomes reverse every one of those attributes: three levels, 1,400 to 1,900 square feet, engineered plank throughout, two and a half baths, and a garage you walk through to reach the stairs.