OAKLAND — Back in the fall of 1986, Michael Reardon and Jill Lawrence were looking to buy their first house. Young artists, they found what turned out to be their heart’s desire: a Craftsman bungalow, built around 1911.

“I walked in and said, ‘This is the place,’ ” Rearden recently recalled, sitting in his living room in the city’s Rockridge neighborhood, where the gabled front porches and generous eaves of Craftsman bungalows are everywhere. The rooms around him were an expanse of dark wood: abundant wainscoting, built-in cabinets with tulip motifs on the glass panels, a cozy office nook. Everything was simply and well-crafted, including the brick fireplace that called to mind an ancient hearth.

Thousands of owners of similar century-old homes take a special pride in their Craftsmans, which populate the Bay Area from San Jose’s Willow Glen to Palo Alto’s Professorville district — and to Rockridge, where the Craftsman bungalow is perhaps the defining element of the neighborhood. While the tech industry drives change to the point of distraction, the bungalows seem to bespeak simplicity and older times — and are an extremely hot item in real estate. Made of wood and stone, they are the opposite of ostentatious and practically instruct their owners to sit on their front porches to drink lemonade and talk to neighbors and watch the world go by.

“Sturdy,” Lawrence said, describing her house and the very attitude it seems to project: “You can’t push me over. I come from the roots up.”

These days, it will cost you to buy a piece of such quietude. Rearden and Lawrence purchased their 1,400-square-foot bungalow on Boyd Avenue for $165,000 in 1986. Its lovable idiosyncrasies include an off-center front door, a garage barely big enough to fit a 1915 roadster, and — inside, between living room and the dining room with its stenciled box-beam ceiling — pocket doors that are as squeaky as they are grand.

Similar homes lately have sold for about $1.3 million, and larger Craftsmans sell for $2 million and up.

That escalation in pricing only begins to tell the story.

When Craftsman bungalows started to proliferate after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, they tended to be build-it-yourself “kit homes” ordered from Sears and other catalogs, often assembled by owners, many of them factory workers not long off the farm. One Sears model, known as the Elsmore, cost $1,945, the Rockridge News reported last year, saying that “today’s homeowner is likely to pay that just for a new water heater, delivered and installed.”

In Rockridge, perhaps no one is more aware of these changes than Ron Kriss, a real estate agent who has listed, renovated and sold scores of Craftsmans since the late 1980s. Last summer, he decided to throw a 100-year birthday party for the 124 Craftsman bungalows built in Rockridge in 1915. (He identified them by combing through county property records.)

He invited their owners to the Rockridge Café — a popular spot on College Avenue, the neighborhood strip — for cake and ice cream, and gave out pewter centenary plaques as gifts, each engraved with the image of a classic bungalow. A collection was taken up for local public schools.

Kriss plans to throw another party this summer for the owners of the 136 local Craftsman bungalows built in 1916. All told, he estimates that Rockridge is dotted with nearly 3,000 such bungalows, built between 1905 and 1930.

One recent afternoon, he drove through the narrow shady streets, waxing about changes in Rockridge, where public schools have improved so that young families — generally wealthier and somewhat less diverse than years ago — now put down roots instead of moving to the suburbs. Plenty of new owners are lawyers and doctors, or work in tech or finance, hopping on BART for the short ride to San Francisco.

Charming as they are, these smallish bungalows are a bit constrained for many growing families.

Driving past a bungalow under renovation, Kriss said, “So many of the people are adding on a second story or adding on in the back. So if anything, they’re changing and degrading the integrity of the bungalows we have here. They’re an endangered species.”

One thing Craftsman owners tend not to do is mess with their front porches. Given the small setbacks, the porches practically function as outdoor rooms, where families sit and welcome the postman: “On a beautiful day, we’re here,” said Mari Morrish, standing on the porch of her century-old Craftsman on Lawton Avenue. “My husband is reading his magazine, the kids are shooting hoops or skateboarding up and down the block. And then the whole neighborhood comes out and congregates on each other’s porches — back and forth. We socialize a lot, and there’s an annual block party. We all come out and bring out our Webers, put ’em in the middle of the street, bring out the snow cone machine.”

What it comes down to is this: In Rockridge, it’s the architecture that engenders a sense of community.

The thousands of Craftsman bungalows “tie into a way of life and a perspective,” said Kevin Faughnan, a board member of the Rockridge Community Planning Council who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. “Everything is ‘go, go, go’ now. But I think there’s a side of people that just says, ‘Pshaw, I don’t need all this complexity. I’m going to go home and read a book, sit in my chair by the window.’ “

Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-506. Read his stories at www.mercurynews.com/richard-scheinin, and follow him at Twitter.com/RealEstateRag.