Martenes / Carmelita

Cornered into US Route 85 and Grand Road, Martenes / Carmelita really doesn’t have an identity. It is rather small, only encompassing about a dozen blocks of middle to upper middle-class homes. For prospective residents, there is a mix of adobe cottages with red-tilted roofs to contemporary, updated homes with a refined and polished aesthetic. There is also a mobile home park, which damages the up-and-coming reputation Martenes is trying to create. For your shopping needs, Mountain View Center and Grant Park Plaza serve as the only commercial locations with the usual strip mall amenities.

Martenes / Carmelita’s housing inventory is extremely diverse. If you drive through the community, you’ll notice the blend of old, one-story homes (although you can find a fair share of large, boxy, old homes within pockets of the community) and beautifully groomed two-story houses that are pretty well-defined in their separate locations. These newer, more elegantly designed two-story homes dominate stretches of the neighborhood, including Martens Avenue and Woodleaf Court. Properties are relatively deep here and, may I say, beautifully groomed. Some even have enough space for a three-car garage. For the price, house listings vary from $900,000 to a pricey $2 million. For cheaper accommodations, there are plenty of condominiums in the area. They tend to be listed around $800,000.

For students, families usually send their children through the Mountain View-Whisman School District and/or the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District. While Huff Elementary School lies within the neighborhood, Graham Middle School and Mountain View High School are within close proximity. However, their scores are a bit subpar. For recreation, the Cuesta Park skirts the southwestern corner of the neighborhood. The latter of which comes complete with a children’s playground, community tennis courts, picnic areas, a youth soccer field, a volleyball court, restrooms and a peaceful path for dog walkers and strollers.

This is the neighborhood right at the point where the Steven’s Creek Freeway meets El Camino Real. At the far northeastern end where this intersection happens, there is Sahara Homes, a trailer park right there within earshot of the freeway noise.

Right next to it is a fairly typical strip mall with a Grain d’Or and a Chaat Café and a gas station. This is fairly typical suburban stuff.

Just to the south of this area is one of those newer residential areas where all the homes were built by the same company, giving the neighborhood a certain consistency of appearance that is either admirable or oppressively homogenous depending on your point of view. In this particular case, whoever put together the homes at Sussex Square has managed to create enough differentiation where the homes have a certain level of uniqueness. (In other words, this is not one of those neighborhoods where if you changed the numbers on the homes some people might walk into their neighbors’ homes.) It does however, still have the ever so slight hint of a condo complex feel to it.

The rest of this smallish neighborhood to the south of this area is made up of a mix of newer construction and older homes, often jarringly adjacent to one another. Some of the newer homes are really quite nice and you can tell how pricy they are by the luxury vehicles parked just outside; others, feel a bit pre-fab, or a bit cheapish, as if they were rushed to market.

It’s a bit of a hodgepodge really, without a definable character. As a whole, it doesn’t really make for an attractive neighborhood, feeling more like a neighborhood whose character is in transition.