How this L.A. suburb fell in love with Craftsman properties

When Annette Yasin and her husband, Tom, moved to Pasadena from Michigan greater than a decade in the past, they bought a condominium close to Bungalow Heaven, a 16-block space northeast of Old Town recognized for its substantial assortment of Craftsman bungalows. After common walks within the neighborhood, the couple got here throughout a house on Mar Vista Avenue and rapidly fell in love.

The residence, often known as the Dr. Robert H. Sutton Bungalow, is a superb instance of what makes Craftsman structure so seductive to so many. Outside, its low-sloped roof, large eaves, textured wooden and brick surfaces, and its shaded porch set behind broad overhangs are welcoming and human scaled. Inside, chocolate brown wooden is in all places: partitions, beams, window sills, paneling, wainscoting, furnishings, to not point out built-in cupboards, benches and window seats. A big financial institution of home windows permits a number of mild, however is protected by all these overhangs, so that you don’t really feel uncovered — or overheated. Everything matches and flows collectively — areas, furnishings, lighting, artworks.

Annette Yasin’s Craftsman house has typical parts of the type: textured wooden and brick surfaces.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s cozy. It’s warm,” says Yasin, standing in her eating room, which is stuffed with Craftsman-style furnishings both bought or constructed by her now-late husband — a G.E. engineer who retired early and leaned into his ardour for woodworking.

For over a century, Craftsman properties have been beloved throughout Southern California, from Orange and Long Beach to West Adams and Santa Barbara. But nowhere are they as prevalent as Pasadena. And lately, recognition has soared, as individuals crave its well-made, no-nonsense, and nature-embracing ethos. So a lot so, Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Week, happening Oct. 12-19, has expanded from a weekend to a weeklong occasion this 12 months.

“It’s the rusticity of it,” provides Juan Dela Cruz, a Bungalow Heaven resident and Craftsman house owner who’s guiding me on a tour of the neighborhood together with John G. Ripley, one other native Craftsman proprietor and co-author of the guide “Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven,” forward 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 within the doorway of her kitchen in her Craftsman house, which features a tiled fire. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

The lounge in Annette Yasin’s Craftsman type house seems to be out to the road on Mar Vista Avenue.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Craftsman had its heyday from round 1900 to the early Twenties. It grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, a design philosophy reacting to the Industrial Revolution, with its mass produced items and fast-paced way of life, and the Victorian period, with its frivolous excesses and formal, boxy areas. It promoted, amongst different issues, handcraft, honesty, unified design, pure supplies and design simplicity.

American designers and designers quickly imported these beliefs, led by the likes of designer Gustav Stickley, together with his Craftsman Farms complicated in Morris Plains, N.J., and his standard journal, the Craftsman, and artist, author and entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard, whose Roycroft Artisan Community in upstate New York would change into a religious and architectural template for the motion.

Soon Craftsman, its title derived from Stickley’s journal, had unfold across the nation, and in California, no Craftsman architects have been extra dominant than Pasadena’s personal Greene and Greene, whose extraordinary Gamble House is among the hottest house museums within the state. Greene and Greene would produce over 100 “California Bungalows,” together with their bigger “Ultimate Bungalows,” and the Craftsman fever that adopted would make Pasadena floor zero for California Craftsman, and the Craftsman motion nationwide.

Greene and Greene’s Gamble House is a well-liked house museum, which affords quite a lot of excursions all year long outdoors of Craftsman Week.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Most Craftsman properties weren’t designed by well-known architects just like the Greenes, or John C. Austin, architect of Yasin’s Sutton Bungalow. (Austin additionally designed Los Angeles City Hall.) They have been made by artistic, sure, craftsmen, architects or builders, imagining their very own designs or utilizing package plans, bought by corporations like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Most of the properties weren’t a part of giant developments, like later mid-century properties typically have been. Many have been bespoke creations — tailor-made to 1’s circle of relatives.

On the Bungalow Heaven tour, we study house after suave house, none precisely alike. While sharing related tenets like low-slung horizontality, pure supplies and heat informality, some incorporate parts of Colonial or Spanish structure, others tackle a little bit of Swiss Chalet. Many are predominantly wooden, whereas others showcase brick or tough stucco. Some embrace textured shakes and shingles, or particularly large rafters, giving them the nickname “airplane bungalows.” A couple of have Asian-inspired parts like flared or upturned columns or dormers, whereas others incorporate floral motifs and stained glass. One even has a partial second ground, however nonetheless feels rooted to the bottom.

Many of the properties in Bungalow Heaven incorporate patterned shingles so as to add texture and a way of expertise.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

This Bungalow Heaven house incorporates inexperienced and brown, pure colours widespread on many Craftsman residences.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Famous or not, all are being celebrated throughout Craftsman Week. The occasion, which has been taking place in a single type or one other because the early Nineteen Nineties, options excursions, lectures, themed get-togethers and a craft truthful, celebrating each the well-known properties and the on a regular basis ones. Its enlargement from a weekend to a weeklong occasion this 12 months, notes Bridget Lawlor, preservation director for Pasadena Heritage, permits for extra institutional partnerships.

The Pasadena Museum of History, for example, will host occasions with Cha-Rie Tang, founding father of Pasadena Craftsman Tile — who makes intricate tiles impressed 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 on the museum Oct. 4. The Gamble House will host a number of occasions, together with a “Fire and Light” tour, displaying off the house’s omnipresent leaded glass, a “Details and Joinery” tour and “Musical Storytime,” an out of doors live performance hosted by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. And there’s a tour of the 125-year-old Judson Studios, which provided a lot of Southern California Craftsman properties’ stained glass.

This Bungalow Heaven house incorporates a hefty timber entrance door with a floral patterned stained glass window.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

A key function of the week is the lineup of strolling excursions — many have bought out, and Pasadena Heritage is busy including extra to maintain up with demand. They showcase just a few of town’s many Craftsman neighborhoods. Arroyo Terrace is stuffed with the beautiful, and sometimes costly, work of Greene and Greene. Bungalow Heaven — which turned Pasadena’s first Landmark District in 1989, thanks largely to the persistence of native resident Bob Kneisel — accommodates extra modest, middle-class dwellings. South Marengo showcases properties by famed Craftsman architect Louis B. Easton as effectively Craftsman bungalow courts, that includes bunches of Craftsman properties grouped round widespread areas.

Craftsman, stated Lawlor, is extra standard than ever in Pasadena, and nationwide. Following a dip within the early aughts — it was supplanted in recognition by mid-century trendy for fairly some time — it has surged for a similar cause it got here to the fore within the first place: a response to our flimsy, generic, mass produced ethos, which has solely multiplied as merchandise more and more come to us with only a contact of our telephones.

“It’s an appreciation for things that are made well, that last a long time,” Lawlor stated. “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, writer of “Pasasdena’s Bungalow Heaven.” (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

That cultural ascension is typified by the Apple TV+ sequence “Shrinking,” which takes place in Pasadena and options a number of native Craftsman properties as taking pictures areas. Its manufacturing designer, Cabot McMullen, has talked about how Craftsman’s sense of heat and security helps offset the extreme emotional experiences of a number of the present’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 properties or neighborhoods embrace the movies “Father of the Bride” and “Monster-in-Law” and the reveals “Parenthood” and “Brothers & Sisters.” The Gamble House, by the best way, performed a job in “Back to the Future,” as Doc Brown’s mansion.

A large porch helps shield a big financial institution of wood-trimmed home windows on this Bungalow Heaven house.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Craftsman properties like this one typically function textured stucco, which enhances wooden trim.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

The enchantment, provides Dela Cruz, is moreover a response to our digital age’s profound sense of disconnection and our problem distinguishing fact from fiction.

Craftsman porches present snug communal areas the place individuals can work together with their neighbors. Their entries open straight into dwelling rooms in a welcoming gesture. Bungalow courts create on the spot communities. The construction is uncovered, and durable supplies are effectively put collectively, not simply designed to look that approach.

“The idea was to be frank and honest,” says Dela Cruz’s fellow tour information, 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 guide, “Craftsman Homes: Architecture and Furnishings of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.”

That nonetheless sounds fairly good proper now.