“A neighborhood spent forty years protecting the outside of these houses. Somebody finally did the same for the inside.”
- Sam O'Connor
1190
N Wilson Ave
Pasadena
Bedrooms
4
Bathrooms
2
Total Area
1,834 Sq. FT
Lot Size
9,363 Sq. FT
Price
$2,150,000
A 1912 Craftsman With 2026 Bones
Bungalow Heaven holds more than eight hundred Craftsman houses built between 1900 and 1930, which makes it less a neighborhood than a surviving record of how Southern California housed itself before the car rearranged everything. Pasadena made it a landmark district in 1989, and the National Register followed in 2008. Irvin B. Speicher designed this one in 1912, on a tree-lined block a few minutes from McDonald Park, and it has since been taken apart and put back together by Nicole Douglas Designs under the city’s Design Guidelines for Historic Districts. That phrase usually signals an argument about paint colors. Here it meant reconstruction from the foundation and structure up, with a 200-amp panel, all new copper plumbing, upgraded insulation and a four-ton heat pump added on the way through. The house looks its age on purpose. It is now the only part of it that does.
Listed by: Jessica Romero, Keller Williams Realty
Inside
The front door is solid mahogany and the exterior millwork around it was rehabilitated rather than replaced, which sets the terms for everything behind it. White oak floors run the plan. The living room keeps its wainscoting and its weight-and-pulley windows, the kind that still rise on a counterweight, and a green marble fireplace runs the room without asking for the credit. The kitchen is where the restoration argues hardest, pairing solid maple cabinetry with exposed beams, antique brass hardware and lighting, and a palette drawn from the period rather than from a showroom. The primary suite sits under a box-beam ceiling with French doors opening to the yard, and a walk-in closet handles the part of life nobody photographs. The bathrooms carry a clawfoot tub, marble tile and an arched shower. None of it reads as reproduction, which is the hardest thing to buy and the easiest thing to get wrong.
Outside
The lawn is St. Augustine and the front porch is still the social instrument of the house, which is most of why these blocks work the way they do. The back is the part people will not want to leave. The avocado and lemon trees are established and producing, which is a different claim from simply having them, and bougainvillea runs where it likes. A fountain gives the yard a sound, which matters more out there than any object does. A fire pit and a covered hot tub carry the evenings, and the lighting sits low enough to keep people outside well past them. A detached shed at the rear is being sold as storage and is the obvious studio for anyone who needs a room the house cannot spare. McDonald Park is a short walk away, which in a neighborhood built for porches counts as infrastructure rather than amenity.
The O' Factor
A historic district protects what the street can see. That is the honest limit of the tool. The guidelines govern the facade, the millwork, the windows a neighbor clocks from the sidewalk, and not one of them requires the house behind that facade to work. So the standard Bungalow Heaven trade is a well-guarded exterior sitting on top of a hundred and fourteen year old set of systems, and the buyer takes on the plumbing as a second purchase. This one reversed the order. The structure was rebuilt from the foundation up first and the 1912 house was set back down on top of it, which is the expensive sequence and the only one that holds. Preservation gets talked about as sentiment. Done properly it is engineering, and this is the rare Craftsman where somebody finally did for the inside what the neighborhood has been doing for the outside since 1989.
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The Homes we Represent,
Represent Us.
Every home has a soul. Every human has a place they were meant to be. Our instinct is knowing when the two finally meet. We honor architecture, preserve great design and celebrate the match. Welcome to O’Connor Estates. We’ve been waiting for you.
Proof is in the Properties
SOLD
$8,250,000
11945
Lockridge Rd
Studio City
“Closed in under two weeks at $250,000 over asking, after multiple offers.”
SOLD
$7,775,000
12221
Benmore Ter
Los Angeles
“Sold for $1,514 per square foot.”
SOLD
$5,300,000
2525
Outpost Dr
Los Angeles
“Closed off-market for $250,000 over asking.”
SOLD
$5,140,000
708
N Kenter Ave
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“Sold for $1,619 per square foot.”
SOLD
$4,995,000
10317
Valley Spring Ln
Toluca Lake
“Sold off-market for $1,249 per square foot.”
SOLD
$4,900,000
16557
Park Lane Dr
Los Angeles
“Sold for $1,227 per square foot.”
