Heritage District & downtown Sunnyvale Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

The Murphy Station Heritage Landmark District is small: the 100 block of South Murphy Avenue (originally called Main Street) and a few buildings on Evelyn and Washington avenues. Most of its storefronts are one- or two-story wood-frame buildings. Some are two bays wide with paired, recessed entries, and some two-story buildings have their own street door to the upper floor. The city's guidelines date the styles to about 1900 to 1950, and the Heritage Park Museum dates the block's buildings to 1900 to 1940. At the Evelyn end, the Del Monte building at 100 S. Murphy was moved to the block and dedicated in 1999. It honors the California Packing Company cannery, which packed local fruit.

South of Olive Avenue, the Taaffe-Frances Heritage Neighborhood covers the 500 blocks of South Taaffe and South Frances streets and the west side of South Murphy. It has 59 houses and two duplexes on lots of 5,000 or 6,500 square feet, most built in the 1930s and 1940s. Spanish Revival is the most common style, mixed with Craftsman bungalows, English Tudor, Moderne, Art Deco-influenced and early ranch houses. Garages sit at the back of the lots, front doors face the sidewalk, and planting strips hold the street trees. The blocks look one-story even where a house has a second floor, because that floor is usually tucked into the roof or set toward the back. The city also lists the 400-500 blocks of Frances Street and Murphy Avenue and the 500 block of Taaffe Street as heritage streetscapes.

East of Sunnyvale Avenue, the Heritage District neighborhood fills the blocks between East Evelyn Avenue, South Fair Oaks Avenue and Old San Francisco Road, on streets such as Washington, Iowa, McKinley and Bayview. The city's Heritage Resources Inventory lists individual houses here, including several on the 300 and 400 blocks of East Washington and East McKinley avenues, 252 S. Bayview and two on South Sunnyvale Avenue. Near downtown, redevelopment has added apartments and mixed-use buildings.