Sunset Magazine headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., May 1961. (Menlo Park Planning via Flickr Public Domain)

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.

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A ‘living laboratory'

Famed designer Cliff May and landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church designed the space, built in 1951, to embody the indoor-outdoor ideals the magazine championed.

Old photos of Sunset Magazine employees at the headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (Courtesy of Angela Brassinga)

"Open, adaptable, and seamlessly connected to the outdoors, it's where Sunset redefined what it meant to live in the West," Garvey wrote. "We can't stop the forces of nature that reshape the West year after year, but we can take action to preserve those places that tell our story."

Margaret Brown has countless tales of interacting with wildlife while working as a fact checker, then later in production, for Sunset magazine in Menlo Park from 1999 to 2014. Hawks hunted squirrels, a fox once roamed the grounds and she watched in awe as a toad living in a greenhouse flowerpot caught a fly. There were bees, chickens and food grown as part of a project called the "One-Block Diet," which tested the concept that you could grow almost anything you need on one block. She would love to see the space, which she considers an oasis, be preserved as a park open to the public.

"The space itself was part of the reason it was such a great job," she said. "In production, we had floor-to-desk glass windows, and it looked out over the gardens. … It made a nice respite to look away from your computer and look out on all the nature."

Sunset Magazine headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (Angela Swartz/ For SFGATE)

Angela Brassinga also worked at the campus from 1988 until 2015, when the magazine moved to Jack London Square in Oakland. Brassinga, who managed the test kitchen, described the site as a "living laboratory," remembering employees testing campfire meals on the outdoor firepit.

Site developer N17 is opposed to the designation, arguing that the building and its landscaping have undergone significant changes and that the magazine perpetuated an exclusionary vision of white suburbia. But others say the latter claim is simply a means of defaming the magazine so its historic status wouldn't prevent development.

The site is now eligible for the National Register of Historic Places under three categories: Architecture, Landscape Architecture (New York's Central Park and San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and Presidio all have this designation) and Commerce.

Old photos of Sunset Magazine employees at the headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (Courtesy of Angela Brassinga)

Because the property owner - Willow Project, LLC, which bought the Menlo Park site for $72 million in 2018, objected to the designation, it's not on that list. It is automatically placed on the California Register of Historical Resources, though.

N17 told SFGATE in an email that it is pressing forward with its application to the city of Menlo Park to build three towers, one topping 31 stories. The development would include 665 units of housing (133 deemed affordable), 300,000 square feet of office space, a 130-room hotel, almost 5 acres of parks and open space, restaurants, a playground, fitness clubs and swimming pools.

The project is near a busy high school in a mostly residential neighborhood, which has caused concerns about increased traffic and the development being ill-fitted for the space. The city deemed the application complete on Nov. 14, 2024. But on Jan. 13 and May 6, 2025, the city found the application to be inconsistent with multiple city development standards.

Nomination process

With hope that it could help prevent the Sunset campus from being torn down, the Menlo Park Historical Association, a nonprofit established in 1971, paid Southern California-based Chattel, Inc., to research and prepare a nomination for the property to be recognized by the state and federal governments as historically significant. This process began in July 2024.

Sunset Magazine headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (Courtesy of Margaret Sloan)

Sunset Magazine headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Nov 2, 2011. (chuck b. via Flickr CC 2.0)

Sunset Magazine headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Nov. 2, 2011. (chuck b. via Flickr CC 2.0)

Alvin-Christian Nuval is a principal associate at Chattel who helped submit the 58-page nomination. He said in a phone interview with SFGATE that his organization used archives, both from the association and UC Santa Barbara's architecture and design collection at its Art, Design & Architecture Museum, to put together the application. The application includes a description of the site's setting, interiors, additions and alterations, along with photographs, site maps and historical information.

Nuval said that with some of the properties he examines for historical preservation "it's clear it's a historic property." This was the case with the Sunset site.

"Sunset was designed by a master architect, working with a master landscape architect," he said. "It's a unique sample of applying this ranch style to a commercial office building."

Developer's opposition

Site developer Oisín Heneghan saw the nomination as a ruse to block new development. He also said that Sunset's history should not be celebrated because it presented the ideals of white Western living, leaving out minority groups. Originally established in 1898, Sunset served as a promotional tool for the Southern Pacific Railroad, aiming to challenge harmful notions of a lawless West and encourage travel and growth in the region.

The former Sunset Magazine headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (Angela Swartz/ For SFGATE)

"The board will be saying [if they approve the nomination that] the long-vacant, obsolete office building is more important than the homes of hundreds of low-income future residents," Heneghan told the commission in May.

A representative for the Menlo Park Historical Association told SFGATE that Heneghan's concerns lack credibility and acknowledged that it is true that magazines in the 1950s and '60s did not have a lot of racial diversity on their pages. Karen Marie Kittmerman, a historical association board member, told the historical commission that Sunset "defined a down-to-earth optimistic culture."

Heneghan's claim that the property is vacant is untrue. Workspace Strategies leased the space in early 2025 to open Willow Workplace, a co-working office rental, meeting and event space. It opened the building for co-working in May and includes private offices, a fitness center and yoga studio, and a community cafe; members can walk the grounds and host private events. Day passes are $60 and individuals can pay $700 a month to sign up for a co-working space, according to its website.

In response to Heneghan's statement that the campus has significantly changed, state historian Amy Crain said that a site's historic integrity is evaluated for the property as a whole, not individual features like specific plants.

Sunset senior food writers Andrew Baker and Elaine Johnson test a salad in Sunset's one of four kitchens; here is the first issue of Sunset and the centennial issue fronts. (Getty Images/S.F. Chronicle)

Properties "are not expected to be preserved in amber, buildings and landscapes are expected to experience change over time," she said.

State Historic Preservation Officer Julianne Polanco noted that economic and social matters are not considered in the determination of historic register eligibility.

"That does not mean our office isn't sympathetic to housing needs or developer rights or to any other public desired amenity to make communities thrive today or tomorrow," she said.

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