Pasadena

About Pasadena.

The Crown City: anchor of the San Gabriel Valley's historic residential market. Home to the Tournament of Roses, the Norton Simon Museum, Caltech, and the largest concentration of intact early-20th-century Craftsman bungalows in California.

Pasadena is the anchor. More of the San Gabriel Valley’s architectural story was written here than anywhere else, and more of it still stands. The Indiana Colony incorporated on January 31, 1874, on former Rancho San Pasqual land, and the city of Pasadena incorporated in 1886. The Santa Fe railroad arrived in 1887 and set off a boom. Grand resort hotels followed, and the winter visitors they drew from the East brought the wealth that would pay for fifty years of exceptional houses.

The first great chapter was Craftsman. In the early 1900s, Greene and Greene raised the California bungalow to an art form here, and a generation of architects and builders carried the idea street by street across the city. Nowhere is that legacy denser than Bungalow Heaven, which the city designated as its first landmark district on November 14, 1989. What buying inside those blocks actually takes, the street-visible review rules, the Mills Act math, the inspection findings a hundred-year-old bungalow will hand you, is walked in Buying in Bungalow Heaven. The city’s role as the movement’s American capital is told in The Arts and Crafts Movement in Southern California.

Taste turned after the First World War. Pasadena’s architects looked to Spain and the Mediterranean, and the city gained its second signature: the white walls, deep-set windows, and low tile roofs of Spanish Colonial Revival. Wallace Neff, Sylvanus Marston, and Reginald Davis Johnson all built defining work here. How the style arrived, who drove it, and why it swept the whole valley is the story of the Spanish Revival Wave.

The public buildings kept pace with the houses. Pasadena City Hall, by Bakewell and Brown, was completed on December 27, 1927, and entered the National Register of Historic Places on July 28, 1980. Bertram Goodhue shaped the early campus plan for Caltech, and Myron Hunt left his mark on institutions and estates across the city.

Block by block, the neighborhoods carry the record. Madison Heights opened with a 63 lot subdivision in July 1906, filled through the 1910s with the substantial houses of professional Pasadena, and kept building straight through the Spanish Colonial Revival twenties. Orange Heights, on the blocks between Jackson and Mountain, holds some of the most intact early twentieth century residential fabric in the city.

Preservation here has real machinery behind it. The city’s combined designations list, last updated December 8, 2023, records 27 designated landmark districts. Pasadena also holds 130 National Register listings, five of them National Historic Landmarks and 31 of them historic districts, complete through National Park Service postings of June 19, 2026. The Mills Act gives that machinery financial weight. Established by ordinance in 2002, the city’s Historic Property Contract program lets owners of qualifying historic properties contract with the city to maintain a home’s historic character in exchange for reduced property taxes. Designated landmarks, National Register properties, contributing houses in landmark or National Register districts, and any building by Greene and Greene qualify. Past participants saved between 20 and 75 percent, averaging around 50 percent. The 2026 program guidelines set a two million dollar valuation cap for single family homes, with exceptions for historic monuments, Greene and Greene work, and individually listed National Register properties.

I read these houses the way my building years, 1978 to 1998, taught me to read them. A Marston living room and a Neff courtyard ask different questions of a buyer, and a century old house answers honestly if you know where to look. This page anchors the Pasadena shelf of the library. The neighborhoods, styles, and architects wired to it carry the details, and the essays above carry the history.

Historic Districts & Neighborhoods.

• Orange Heights · Pasadena bungalow neighborhood between Jackson Street and East Mountain Street, listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 as the Orange Heights/Barnhart Tracts Historic District. Intact early twentieth century Craftsman fabric a few blocks west of Bungalow Heaven.
• Madison Heights · Pasadena neighborhood south of California Boulevard, found eligible for landmark designation in 2018 and home to four designated single block landmark districts. Craftsman era fill layered with 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean Revival.
• Bungalow Heaven · Approximately 16-block, 125-acre residential neighborhood in north-central Pasadena. The largest concentration of intact early-twentieth-century Craftsman bungalows in the city. Pasadena's first locally designated Landmark District (November 14, 1989). Listed on the National Register of Historic Places (April 10, 2008, NRHP 08000260) and the California Register of Historical Resources. The National Register listing identifies 522 contributing and 164 non-contributing buildings across the sixteen-block area. Named one of the American Planning Association's "10 Great Places in America" in 2009.

Styles Concentrated Here.

• American Foursquare · Early-twentieth-century American vernacular style that produced large numbers of modest two-story homes throughout American suburbs from roughly 1895 through 1930. The SGV inventory is significant, particularly in the older neighborhoods of Pasadena, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre, and Monrovia. The Foursquare overlaps with the Craftsman in some examples, sharing interior detailing including built-ins, wood paneling, and beamed ceilings, and is often mistaken at first glance for Colonial Revival before closer inspection reveals the boxier proportions and the full-width porch.
• Craftsman · American architectural style that flourished roughly 1900 to 1930 in reaction to Victorian ornament and industrial mass production. Southern California Craftsman bungalows define the SGV's earliest residential character, with the largest intact concentration in Pasadena's Bungalow Heaven Landmark District.
• Folk Victorian · Modest vernacular counterpart to the elaborate Queen Anne, produced widely by builders working from pattern books and trade publications. Folk Victorian homes survive in the oldest neighborhoods of Pasadena, Monrovia, Sierra Madre, and the older parts of other SGV cities. Many examples have been heavily remodeled or replaced, and well-preserved examples in designated districts are increasingly rare.
• Italian Renaissance Revival · Formal classical style used for select prestige residences in the SGV, often by Myron Hunt and contemporaries. Examples concentrate in San Marino and along Pasadena's Orange Grove Boulevard.
• Mediterranean Revival · Closely related to Spanish Colonial Revival but drawing more directly from Italian and broader Mediterranean precedents. Common in SGV estate construction of the 1920s, particularly San Marino.
• Mid-Century Modern · Postwar modern style emphasizing indoor-outdoor flow, structural honesty, and integration with site. In the SGV, MCM is well-represented in Pasadena's Madison Heights and in the foothill communities, often in works by H. Roy Kelley, Buff & Hensman, and Smith and Williams.
• Mission Revival · Earliest of the Spanish-influenced architectural styles in California, predating the Spanish Colonial Revival by roughly twenty years. The style draws from the architecture of the California missions themselves. California-originated and one of the only American architectural styles that diffused from west to east, used heavily for early train depots, schools, and civic buildings, and applied to residential work in early Pasadena, South Pasadena, and surrounding cities throughout its era. The SGV residential inventory is small but architecturally significant.
• Queen Anne Victorian · Elaborate late-Victorian style that dominated American residential architecture from the 1880s through about 1905. The SGV inventory is small compared to San Francisco, but significant examples survive in the oldest neighborhoods of Pasadena, Monrovia, and Sierra Madre. The Queen Anne Cottage at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia, built 1885 to 1886 for Lucky Baldwin, is a National Register landmark and the canonical local reference for the style at its most elaborate.
• Spanish Colonial Revival · Style popularized in California after the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. Spanish Colonial Revival dominated the SGV's interwar prestige residential market, especially in San Marino, San Gabriel, and Pasadena's Madison Heights and Oak Knoll districts.
• Tudor Revival · Picturesque English revival style popular in upscale SGV neighborhoods of the 1920s and 1930s. Notable concentrations exist in Pasadena's Oak Knoll, San Marino, and La Cañada Flintridge.

Architects Who Practiced Here.

• A. Quincy Jones · Archibald Quincy Jones, FAIA (1913 to 1979), was a Los Angeles-based architect whose roughly 5,000 built projects helped define California mid-century modernism. His San Gabriel Valley residential catalog is narrow and is anchored by the Hixon Estate at 1100 Paso Alto Road in Pasadena's Linda Vista hills, commissioned in 1976. Jones served as Dean of the USC School of Architecture and Fine Arts from 1975 to 1978, and his partnership with Frederick Emmons from 1951 to 1969 produced approximately 5,000 Eichler tract houses primarily in the San Fernando Valley and Bay Area.
• Buff and Hensman · Buff and Hensman was a Pasadena-based architectural firm founded in 1948 by Conrad Buff III and Donald Hensman, both then-undergraduates at the USC School of Architecture. The firm designed roughly 200 residences across Southern California from the 1950s through the late 1990s, with the heaviest SGV concentration in Pasadena, Altadena, and San Marino. SGV anchors include Case Study House 20 (the Saul Bass House) in Altadena (1958), the Frank House in Pasadena (1957), and the Thompson Moseley House in San Marino (1959). Pasadena's Poppy Peak Historic District (NRHP 09000182, listed 2009) contains a significant cluster of firm work. The firm operated under four names across its history: Buff and Hensman (1948 to 1957), Buff, Straub and Hensman (1957 to 1961), Buff, Hensman and Associates (1962 to 1989), and Buff, Smith and Hensman (1989 to present).
• Cyril Bennett · Cyril Bennett practiced in Pasadena from 1914 until 1941 across three sequential firm configurations: J. Cyril Bennett, Architect (1914 to 1923), Bennett and Haskell with Fitch Haskell (1924 to 1934), and Bennett and Bennett with his son Robert E. Bennett (1947 to 1955). He trained for seven years as a draftsman under Sylvanus Marston before opening his own practice in April 1914. His Pasadena Civic Auditorium (1932, with George Bergstrom and Fitch Haskell), Pasadena Playhouse Fannie E. Morrison Annex (1936), Raymond Theatre (1921), and Colonial Court bungalow grouping (1916, NRHP 1983) are all still standing. He worked across the full period revival range and was named in the 2004 City of Pasadena Period Revival Architecture report as one of the most prominent residential period revival architects of the 1915 to 1942 span, alongside Reginald D. Johnson, Wallace Neff, Roland Coate, and Myron Hunt.
• Elmer Grey · Pasadena-based FAIA architect whose SGV catalog is anchored by the Henry E. Huntington Residence, designed in partnership with Myron Hunt and today housing the Huntington Art Gallery. Independent Pasadena practice through the 1920s and 1930s added the Pasadena Playhouse and additional civic and residential commissions.
• Frederick Louis Roehrig · Frederick Louis Roehrig practiced in Pasadena from 1886 until the 1930s, designing Castle Green in 1898 along with dozens of mansions and residences across Old Pasadena, Millionaire's Row, Madison Heights, Altadena, and Alhambra. He held California Architect License No. 2 and worked across Queen Anne Victorian, Mission Revival, Craftsman, and Mediterranean Revival styles within a single career.
• G. Lawrence Stimson · G. Lawrence Stimson (1882 to 1939) was a Pasadena architect and builder responsible for approximately 350 Craftsman bungalows in Pasadena and South Pasadena between roughly 1905 and the late 1910s, plus a smaller number of larger commissions. His SGV catalog includes the Italian Renaissance Revival mansion on South Orange Grove Boulevard now known as the Tournament House (1906 to 1914), the Mission Revival residence at 227 Oaklawn Avenue in South Pasadena with Greene and Greene-designed interiors (1907), and the 1917 Stimson family residence in San Marino. He worked inside the family real estate development business his father, George Woodbury Stimson, founded in Pasadena in the late 1880s.
• Garrett Van Pelt · Pasadena-based partner architect from 1913 to 1955, first as draftsman then partner with Sylvanus Marston, later with Edgar Maybury in Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury (1922 to 1927), then independent practice from June 1927, then partnership with George Lind (Van Pelt and Lind) developing Santa Anita Oaks in Arcadia. Designed or co-designed hundreds of custom homes across Pasadena, San Marino, Altadena, Arcadia, and the surrounding San Gabriel Valley over a four-decade career anchored in Pasadena.
• Gordon B. Kaufmann · Pasadena resident 1916 through 1939, trained as draftsman in Reginald Johnson's Pasadena office 1916 to 1920, partner in Johnson, Kaufmann, and Coate from 1921 to 1924 at 100 East Colorado Boulevard in Old Pasadena, with Pasadena, San Marino, Arcadia, and Claremont commissions spanning Period Revival residential through monumental institutional Streamline Moderne.
• Greene and Greene · Charles Sumner Greene (1868 to 1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870 to 1954) established their architectural practice in Pasadena on Colorado Street in January 1894 after training together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The firm produced Robert Judson Clark's four "ultimate bungalows" between 1907 and 1909 (Blacker and Gamble in Pasadena, Thorsen in Berkeley, Pratt in Ojai) and dissolved in 1922. Henry continued residential practice in Pasadena into the 1930s.
• H. Roy Kelley · H. Roy Kelley was a Los Angeles-based residential architect with a documented Pasadena, San Marino, South Pasadena, and Rancho Santa Anita catalog from the mid-1930s through 1950. He took his architecture degree from Cornell University in 1915 and was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) in 1940. He specialized in Early California, Monterey Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, English Revival with Cotswold Cottage features, and one-story California ranch designs. The 2004 City of Pasadena Period Revival Architecture report names him among the architects who established the California ranch as a residential type, alongside Wallace Neff, Palmer Sabin, and Donald MacMurray. His papers are preserved at Cornell University (thirteen scrapbooks of designs, articles, and photographs of his residences from 1913 to 1965) and the University of California, Santa Barbara Architecture and Design Collection (6.5 linear feet, including annotated drafts of his memoir 50 Happy Years of Architecture).
• Heineman and Heineman · Heineman and Heineman was a Pasadena architectural practice operating under various names from 1906 through 1939, producing an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 building designs across Southern California with more than 20 documented residences in Pasadena alone. The firm is the most prolific Craftsman-era architectural practice in the San Gabriel Valley after Greene and Greene. Bowen Court at 539 East Villa Street, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is the firm's most architecturally significant SGV commission. Arthur Heineman is also credited with the invention of the motel typology through the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo (1925).
• Joseph J. Blick · Pasadena resident from 1887, practiced from Pasadena offices c. 1900 through 1937 retirement, designed residences and civic works across Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, and Altadena, listed as one of five architects in the 1902 Pasadena city directory alongside Greene and Greene.
• Myron Hunt · Pasadena-based architect whose institutional and residential work shaped the formal civic and estate landscape of the SGV in the early 20th century. Frequently partnered with Elmer Grey.
• Paul R. Williams · Paul R. Williams trained as a draftsman at Reginald D. Johnson's Pasadena office in the mid-1910s before opening his own practice in 1923. His SGV residential catalog concentrates in Pasadena, San Marino, and La Cañada Flintridge, spanning Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Tudor Revival, and French Country vocabularies from the late 1920s through the early 1970s.
• Reginald Davis Johnson · Reginald Davis Johnson, FAIA (1882 to 1952), was a Pasadena-based architect whose San Gabriel Valley work spans roughly 1912 through the mid-1930s in a Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival vocabulary. His SGV residential catalog concentrates on Lombardy Road and Hillcrest Avenue in Pasadena and the estate sections of San Marino, including the McDuffie House. He practiced briefly from 1921 to 1924 as Johnson, Kaufmann and Coate, the partnership responsible for All Saints' Episcopal Church in Pasadena and a sequence of Spanish Colonial Revival estates across the South Orange Grove corridor and into San Marino.
• Roland E. Coate · Roland E. Coate practiced residential architecture in the San Gabriel Valley from 1919 through the 1950s, joining Reginald Davis Johnson's Pasadena practice on arrival in Los Angeles and then serving as a full partner in the firm of Johnson, Kaufmann and Coate from 1921 to 1924. He opened his independent practice in 1925, initially with a Pasadena office and later at 816 West 5th Street in downtown Los Angeles. He lived in Pasadena at 389 California Terrace in the Arroyo Park neighborhood from about 1921 through at least 1937 before the family moved to 1255 Oak Grove Avenue in San Marino. He was one of the early exponents of the Monterey Colonial Revival in California and worked at estate scale in San Marino and Pasadena during the period revival era. His professional papers, spanning 45.5 linear feet and dating from 1916 to 1957, are held at the Architecture and Design Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
• Smith and Williams · Smith and Williams was a South Pasadena architecture firm active from 1946 to 1973, producing over 600 projects across the San Gabriel Valley including private residences, schools, churches, and commercial buildings. The firm's pragmatic modernism shaped Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, La Cañada Flintridge, Monrovia, and Azusa. The complete archive is held at the UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum.
• Sylvanus Marston · Pasadena architect credited with creating the bungalow-court typology in 1909. His practice, later Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury and then Marston and Maybury, produced roughly a thousand projects across Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, Alhambra, and the wider SGV, spanning more style periods than any of his flagship contemporaries.
• Wallace Neff · Born on the McNally family ranch in La Mirada in 1895 and raised from childhood in Altadena, Wallace Neff opened his office in Pasadena in 1922 and kept the San Gabriel Valley at the center of a career that ran from 1919 to 1975. His surviving SGV work concentrates in Pasadena, San Marino, and Altadena, with landmark commissions in Sierra Madre (Villa del Sol d'Oro, 1928) and Glendora (Singer Mansion, 1932 to 1934). His papers are held at the Huntington Library in San Marino.
• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue · Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was the New York architect appointed supervisory architect of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, whose Spanish Colonial Revival work at the Exposition popularized the style across California, and whose direct Pasadena commissions across the last decade of his life include the 1917 master plan for the California Institute of Technology and its earliest buildings, the 1916 Herbert Coppell House at 1245 South Grand Avenue known as Mi Sueño, and the design for the Pasadena War Memorial Flagpole at Colorado Boulevard and Orange Grove that his successor firm and the sculptor Lee Lawrie completed and dedicated on February 12, 1927. He practiced from a New York office from 1914 until his death in 1924, after over two decades as a partner in the Boston firm of Cram, Wentworth and Goodhue and its successor Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. His professional archive of drawings, photographs, business records, and correspondence dating from 1882 to 1980 is held at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York.
• Frank Lloyd Wright · Frank Lloyd Wright practiced from a Los Angeles office briefly in the early 1920s and built the four Los Angeles-area textile-block houses in 1923 and 1924, of which only the Alice Millard House in Pasadena sits inside the San Gabriel Valley. He then abandoned the West Coast and returned to Taliesin. He came back to the Valley 27 years later to build the Wilbur C. Pearce House in Bradbury, a Usonian solar hemicycle completed in 1950. The two commissions bracket his lifelong pursuit of a democratic modular residential architecture for the United States, a project he named Usonian. His archive of drawings, correspondence, photographs, and models was transferred in 2012 from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin West into the joint stewardship of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. Original Wright drawings for the Millard House are held separately at the Library of Congress.

Sources and references.

• A Brief History of Pasadena, founding and incorporation record, City of Pasadena (https://www.cityofpasadena.net/about-pasadena/history-of-pasadena/)
• Combined Designations list, landmark district count, list updated December 8, 2023, City of Pasadena (https://www.cityofpasadena.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/Combined-Designations.pdf)
• Historic Preservation Incentives, Mills Act eligibility and past savings, City of Pasadena (https://www.cityofpasadena.net/planning/planning-division/design-and-historic-preservation/historic-preservation/historic-preservation-incentives/)
• Mills Act Program Guidelines, 2026 valuation cap and exceptions, City of Pasadena (https://www.cityofpasadena.net/planning/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/MILLS-ACT-PROGRAM-GUIDELINES.pdf)
• History, Madison Heights subdivision and development record, Madison Heights Neighborhood Association (https://www.mhnapasadena.org/history)
• National Register of Historic Places listings in Pasadena, complete through NPS postings of June 19, 2026, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Register_of_Historic_Places_listings_in_Pasadena,_California)