Sierra Madre

About Sierra Madre.

Sierra Madre is a three square mile foothill village at the base of the Mt. Wilson Trail, a resort era town of Victorian, Craftsman, and Spanish Revival stock where the wisteria still blooms and the canyon keeps its cabins.

Sierra Madre, California is the San Gabriel Valley foothill city with three documented Greene and Greene commissions and a city landmark register of more than fifty properties, all inside three square miles. That density is the story here. This is one of the smallest cities in the valley, and on a per block basis one of the richest in surviving early fabric. The game for a buyer is scale: the whole market is small, the landmark stock is a meaningful share of it, and the difference between a designated house, an undesignated early house, and a rebuilt one decides both what you pay and what you may touch.

A trail town before it was a city

Sierra Madre began as a foothill resort. The Mt. Wilson Trail climbs out of the north end of town, a route the Tongva cut long before the first subdivision, and by the 1880s the town below it was serving the mountain trade: the Sierra Madre Villa Hotel drew the health seekers, and Lizzie’s Trail Inn fed the hikers at the trailhead. The railroad era filled in the village, and on February 2, 1907 the residents voted seventy-one to twenty-five to incorporate; the city stood eighteen days later with a population near five hundred (City of Sierra Madre). The boundaries never grew much. Three square miles then, three square miles now, wedged between Pasadena and Altadena on the west, Arcadia on the south and east, and the Angeles National Forest at its back. The famous wisteria vine, planted in the 1890s and now covering more than an acre, is on the city seal, and the town still throws it a festival every spring. Small has been the identity from the start, and small is why so much survived.

The Greenes came here three times

Three Greene and Greene commissions stand in Sierra Madre, and the paper trail on all three is first rate. The earliest is the Edgar W. Camp House of 1904, titled in the office’s own hand as a bungalow for Edgar W. Camp, seven sheets surviving at the Avery Architectural Archives. The Jennie A. Reeve Cottage of 1906 sits at 197 North Mountain Trail Avenue, a designated city landmark, and the original drawings survive at Avery, sheet dated March 9, 1906 (Avery Architectural Archives; City of Sierra Madre Designated Historical Properties List). Reeve was already a Greene client: their celebrated 1904 house for her in Long Beach was one of the first commissions where the office designed the furniture and fixtures along with the building. The Sierra Madre cottage came two years later, a mountain retreat, and the two buildings are routinely confused. They should not be. The Long Beach house never left Long Beach. The Sierra Madre cottage was drawn for this street. The third commission is the William J. Lawless House of 1908, recorded in the Greene and Greene Virtual Archives (USC).

Easton, and the builder’s bench

The other name on the landmark list that matters to anyone studying Craftsman work is Louis B. Easton. The Caldwell/Fairbank House of 1907 at 647 West Sierra Madre Boulevard is his, per the city’s own register (City of Sierra Madre Designated Historical Properties List). Easton practiced in the Pasadena area from roughly 1904 to 1914 and built about twenty-five houses, a designer builder who worked the material himself: rough sawn redwood, torch burned and wire brushed to raise the grain, joinery meant to be seen. The house nearly went down in 1995 and was saved by purchase, which is the thinnest kind of preservation there is. It made the register afterward. Easton’s work is the honest end of the Craftsman spectrum, closer to the bench than the drafting table, and Sierra Madre holding one is exactly in character for a town this size.

Fifty landmarks in three square miles

The city maintains its own Designated Historical Properties List, more than fifty entries, published and current (City of Sierra Madre, revised 2023). The Victorian layer runs deep for a town this small: the Wilson-Bixby House of 1881, the William Deutsch House of 1883, the Norris House of 1884, the Emile Deutsch House and Cigar Factory of 1885, the Hawks and Copps Building of 1887 that later ran as the Hotel Shirley, and the Pinney House, the grand survivor of the resort hotel era. Over that sits the Craftsman and bungalow fabric of the trail town years, then a Spanish Colonial Revival layer from the twenties, then a quiet midcentury layer from the fifties and sixties infill. The city also runs a Mills Act program, which for an owner of a designated property converts the landmark obligation into a property tax contract. In a market this small that program is worth understanding before you write an offer, not after.

One more entry in the record says something about this town’s relationship to the bungalow. American Bungalow magazine was founded here in 1990 by John Brinkmann, and for decades the national Craftsman revival was edited from Sierra Madre. The town that kept its bungalows became the town that taught the country to want them back.

The canyon

Sierra Madre Canyon is its own world at the top of the town, a creek fold of cabins and cottages on footpath scale streets, with the 1913 Canyon Store still standing at its center. The canyon’s record is deep enough that it carries its own page in this library, so here I will say only this: canyon stock and village stock are two different markets wearing one zip code, and they must be assessed separately.

Reading the houses

Here is where my background does the work. I have held a California real estate license since 1990. From 1978 to 1998 I built custom homes, and finish carpentry was my specialty within that work. Twenty years of building teaches you to read a house from the inside out, and in Sierra Madre that reading carries extra weight because the stock is old, the lots are tight, and the additions came in every decade since 1900. In an early house here I am looking for the original casing profiles repeating room to room, sash that belongs to its walls, floor framing that tells one construction story instead of three, and porch work that matches the roof over it. A designated landmark tells you the shell is protected. Only the reading tells you what is inside it.

Sierra Madre against its neighbors

The town sits against the mountains with Pasadena and Altadena to the west and Arcadia wrapping the south and east. Pasadena has the monuments and the scale. Altadena has the unincorporated latitude and its own deep Craftsman bench. Arcadia’s prize is postwar estate land. Sierra Madre’s prize is concentration: the most early fabric per block of any of them, in a market small enough that individual houses move the record.

How to verify what you are looking at

The city’s Designated Historical Properties List is published by the Planning and Community Preservation Department and names the landmark, the year, and where the record supports it the architect. The Reeve Cottage drawings sit at the Avery Architectural Archives at Columbia; the Lawless House sits in the Greene and Greene Virtual Archives at USC. For any single house, the city permit record tells you what was touched and when, and the Mills Act contract status is a matter of public record. In this market the landmark list is short enough to actually read, which is the way I like a record to come. This page is part of the larger city record, and I keep it current as the register changes.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

Architects Who Practiced Here.

• 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.
• 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.