When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan more than a decade ago, they purchased a condo near Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block area northeast of Old Town known for its substantial collection of Craftsman bungalows. After regular walks in the neighborhood, the couple came across a home on Mar Vista Avenue and quickly fell in love.
The residence, known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a great example of what makes Craftsman architecture so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, wide eaves, textured wood and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wood is everywhere: walls, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furniture, not to mention built-in cabinets, benches and window seats. A large bank of windows lets in lots of light, but is protected by all those overhangs, so you don’t feel exposed — or overheated. Everything fits and flows together — spaces, furnishings, lighting fixtures, artworks.
Annette Yasin’s Craftsman home has typical elements of the style: textured wood and brick surfaces.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her dining room, which is filled with Craftsman-style furniture either purchased or built by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his passion for woodworking.
For over a century, Craftsman homes have been beloved across Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And in recent years, popularity has soared, as people crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So much so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, taking place Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong event this year.
“It’s the rusticity of it,” adds Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman homeowner who is guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood along with John G. Ripley, another local Craftsman owner and co-author of the book “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” ahead of Craftsman Week. “You notice the timbers overhanging. Sometimes you’ll see the roughness in the wood, or you’ll see a three-dimensional relief in the grain. It gives you that connection with nature; that connection with the source from which it came — the tree,” says Dela Cruz.
Annette Yasin, left, stands in the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman home, which includes a tiled fireplace. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The living room in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman style home looks out to the street on Mar Vista Avenue.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman had its heyday from around 1900 to the early 1920s. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced goods and fast-paced lifestyle, and the Victorian era, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy spaces. It promoted, among other things, handcraft, honesty, unified design, natural materials and design simplicity.
American designers and architects soon imported these ideals, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, with his Craftsman Farms complex in Morris Plains, N.J., and his popular magazine, the Craftsman, and artist, writer and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would become a spiritual and architectural template for the movement.
Soon Craftsman, its name derived from Stickley’s magazine, had spread around the country, and in California, no Craftsman architects were more dominant than Pasadena’s own Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is one of the most popular home museums in the state. Greene and Greene would produce over a hundred “California Bungalows,” including their larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that followed would make Pasadena ground zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman movement nationwide.
Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a popular home museum, which offers a variety of tours throughout the year outside of Craftsman Week.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Most Craftsman homes were not designed by well-known architects like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin also designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They were made by creative, yes, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their own designs or using kit plans, sold by companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the homes were not part of large developments, like later mid-century homes often were. Many were bespoke creations — tailored to one’s own family.
On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we examine home after artful home, none exactly alike. While sharing similar tenets like low-slung horizontality, natural materials and warm informality, some incorporate elements of Colonial or Spanish architecture, others take on a bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wood, while others showcase brick or rough stucco. Some include textured shakes and shingles, or especially wide rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A few have Asian-inspired elements like flared or upturned columns or dormers, while others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second floor, but still feels rooted to the ground.
Many of the homes in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles to add texture and a sense of craftsmanship.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates green and brown, natural colors common on many Craftsman residences.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Famous or not, all are being celebrated during Craftsman Week. The event, which has been happening in one form or another since the early 1990s, features tours, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft fair, celebrating both the famous homes and the everyday ones. Its expansion from a weekend to a weeklong event this year, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, allows for more institutional partnerships.
The Pasadena Museum of History, for instance, will host events with Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles inspired by the work of Southern California Arts and Crafts legend Ernest Batchelder. She’s the namesake of the exhibit “Cha-Rie Tang: 48 Years of Artistic Innovation in Pasadena,” which opened at the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host several events, including a “Fire and Light” tour, showing off the home’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an outdoor concert hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which supplied much of Southern California Craftsman homes’ stained glass.
This Bungalow Heaven home incorporates a hefty timber front door with a floral patterned stained glass window.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A key feature of the week is the lineup of walking tours — many have sold out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy adding more to keep up with demand. They showcase a few of the city’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is filled with the exquisite, and often expensive, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which became Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of local resident Bob Kneisel — contains more modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases homes by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as well Craftsman bungalow courts, featuring bunches of Craftsman homes grouped around common spaces.
Craftsman, said Lawlor, is more popular than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip in the early aughts — it was supplanted in popularity by mid-century modern for quite a while — it has surged for the same reason it came to the fore in the first place: a reaction to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has only multiplied as products increasingly come to us with just a touch of our phones.
“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor said. “When I was growing up, you got your furniture from Target. If your vacuum broke, you bought a new one instead of fixing it. I think we’ve now turned a corner. We want things that are quality. That are going to last. The same goes for Craftsman homes. They’re not flimsy, cookie-cutter white boxes that you move into. It’s all this beautiful wood or exposed beams. It’s artful and handmade, not a particle board thing that will break soon.”
Bungalow Heaven board member Juan Dela Cruz, left, and John Ripley, author of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and features several local Craftsman homes as shooting locations. Its production designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of warmth and safety helps offset the intense emotional experiences of some of the show’s characters.
“It’s the go-to style for warmth. That homey feeling of coziness. Which is why a lot of filming is done in this area,” says Dela Cruz. Other productions shot in Pasadena Craftsman homes or neighborhoods include the films “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the shows “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the way, played a role in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.
A wide porch helps protect a large bank of wood-trimmed windows on this Bungalow Heaven home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Craftsman homes like this one often feature textured stucco, which complements wood trim.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The appeal, adds Dela Cruz, is furthermore a reaction to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our difficulty distinguishing truth from fiction.
Craftsman porches provide comfortable communal spaces where people can interact with their neighbors. Their entries open directly into living rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create instant communities. The structure is exposed, and sturdy materials are well put together, not just designed to look that way.
“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour guide, Ripley.
“We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness,” wrote Stickley in his 1909 book, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”
That still sounds pretty good right now.
