For 20 years, the lot across from San Jose’s Municipal Rose Garden sat empty. Through the 1930s, houses sprouted up around it _ all of them designed to look like something else from somewhere else _ Cape Cods, Georgian Revivals, Monterey Colonials. When Tresse and Alden Campen broke ground, they built themselves a house of its own space and time. The year? 1956. The style?
California modern. 
Some people walking by would snub their noses at the one-story, redwood-sided house with tall windows and transoms and open carport. ""Is that an Eichler?” they would ask.
Clearly, this was no Rose Garden traditional, the kind of gracious two-story home that has come to define one of San Jose’s older neighborhoods. But the house, like the Campens, embraced the modernist movement of the time. It was the Campen family home for nearly 50 years.
When Tresse decided to sell several years ago, the house appeared on the MLS listings.
"It was a bad picture on the listing but I could tell from the roofline it might be an interesting house,” said Scott Reese, who was moving up from Los Angeles to San Jose with his wife to work for the city’s parks and recreation department.
Reese not only fell in love with this mid-century modern, he embraced it.
"What attracted us to the house was that it is virtually untouched,” he said.
Reese grew up in a post-war tract in the Midwest that had a similar feel. His father worked at modern furniture maker Herman Miller.
"My wife says I’m reliving my childhood,” he said.
The house shared some of the features of Eichler tract homes built for indoor-outdoor living in post-war California _ the open floor plan with birch cabinets, floor-to-ceiling windows, interior courtyards. But "it’s one of the few non-Eichler examples of this period,” Reese said. It was designed by the late local architect Jerry Erickson.
When the Reeses moved in, they set about to care for the home, only upgrading what Tresse had changed. The kitchen counters are granite now, but ""we couldn’t bring ourselves to change the cabinetry.”
The couple has accented the home with some 50s-era furnishings, including an Eames chair and a Saarinen table and Knoll wire-mesh kitchen stools. The master bedroom has two walls of windows, one looking to the central courtyard, the other to a back patio.
"The architecture,” he said, "withstands the test of time."
— julia prodis sulek
Here’s the complete slideshow:
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