By BEN WORTHEN
When chief executives and other well-paid big shots move to the Bay Area, they often settle in Atherton.
Hewlett-Packard Co., who in December paid $7 million for a six-bedroom house in the tony Silicon Valley suburb, according to public records. His predecessor, current Oracle Corp. President Mark Hurd, also lives in Atherton, as do Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt and former eBay Inc. CEO Meg Whitman.
“The town has a lot of cachet,” said Todd Beardsley, a real-estate agent who works in Atherton. “This is where the CEOs are.”
Privacy is a big reason high-profile business leaders move to Atherton. The town requires that lots must be an acre or larger, a size that more or less assures that houses will be widely separated. Mature oaks and redwoods add to the effect. By comparison, a typical home in nearby Menlo Park, another wealthy town, might sit on a quarter of an acre.
In surrounding municipalities, construction projects often get tied up in red tape, but Atherton is building-friendly, said Catherine Marcus, an agent with Sotheby’s International Realty who works in the area. Newcomers often will buy properties with ranch-style houses dating to the 1950s and expand them or replace them with larger structures. These teardowns generally cost more than $3 million, she said.
Atherton was incorporated in 1923 with the intention of keeping the community small and residential, said Marion Oster, president of the Atherton Heritage Association and a 29-year resident. Country estates where wealthy San Franciscans once escaped the summer fog were gradually subdivided, especially during the years after World War II, but the town remains free of stores or businesses, she said. The population, 7,501 in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, hasn’t changed much over the past few decades.
Atherton has an exclusive feel for a much more practical reason: Its houses cost a lot. The median selling price of a home in Atherton was $2.8 million in 2010, according to DataQuick Information Systems, which tracks housing prices. In Menlo Park and Woodside, another neighboring town, the median selling prices were $1.2 million and $980,000, respectively. Real-estate agents say that many Atherton houses are sold privately for much higher sums, and those transactions don’t typically show up in figures provided by data suppliers such as DataQuick.
Prices in Atherton were up 2.9% in 2010 from a year earlier, according to DataQuick. But Mr. Apotheker appears to have had some bargaining power: His 8,390-square-foot house had been listed at $7.85 million.
Despite Mr. Apotheker’s new status as leader of the largest tech company by revenue, his arrival hasn’t fazed local residents. “People are used to it,” said Ms. Oster.
An H-P spokesman said that “our CEO has already settled in as a Silicon Valley resident, and is proud to call California home.”
Write to Ben Worthen at ben.worthen@wsj.com