In a mostly suburban Menlo Park neighborhood sits the former Sunset magazine headquarters, housed in a California ranch-style building with carved sugar pine doors, adobe walls, deep eaves and courtyards, with its expansive lawns backing up onto San Francisquito Creek. The campus buzzed with activity for over half a century, from 1951 to 2015. People refined recipes in the test kitchen, planted experimental gardens, and edited thousands of articles while visitors mulled about the grounds.
Now, a developer wants to demolish the single-story office space and the rest of the 6.7-acre site at 80 Willow Road to build massive towers — with housing, retail, parks, a hotel and more. But that may be harder to see to fruition after a state commission voted 6-0 in May to recommend that the site be declared historically significant. Residents hired a firm to help nominate the site, and the magazine itself spurred 617 people to write support letters for its preservation (versus just 12 against). The property must go through additional steps before it can be officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but it was declared eligible to be placed on the list, which grants it some protections from development.
Without the protection, the Peninsula campus could be “altered to beyond recognition or lost entirely,” wrote Sunset editor-in-chief Hugh Garvey in an open letter to readers in April. The designation does not prevent redevelopment of the site outright, but requires a more rigorous historical impact review as part of the environmental analysis of the property, which it is undergoing over the next several months, according to Mayor Drew Combs…