“Busch Gardens was thirty-two acres and a public wonder. This is the piece of it somebody gets to live in.”
- Sam O'Connor
485
Madeline Dr
Pasadena
Bedrooms
2
Bathrooms
2
Total Area
912 Sq. FT
Lot Size
16,000 Sq. FT
Price
$1,595,000
The Old Mill House
Adolphus Busch spent the first decade of the century turning thirty-two acres of Pasadena hillside into a public garden, and in 1910 he put a tea house at the edge of it. The gardens are gone. They were subdivided in the 1930s into what is now some of the most protected residential land in the city, and the tea house is the piece that stayed, still sitting on more than 16,000 square feet of the original grounds. It goes by the Old Mill House, and it has been written up in An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles, the Pasadena Star-News, and Cottages & Bungalows, which is a considerable amount of press for 912 square feet. Most of what a city builds purely for its own delight does not make it through the century. This did.
Listed by Bryony Atkinson and Abigail Dotson, MAISONRE
Inside
Nine hundred and twelve square feet, and the ceilings still go up rather than across, which is the entire trick of the place. The leaded stained glass is original, the millwork was cut by hand, and the built-in cabinetry is still doing the job it was built to do, which is rarer than it sounds in a house that has changed hands for over a hundred years. A lofted guest space sits above the main floor and reads as a room rather than a compromise. Below it runs a two-story lofted basement, an unusual thing to write about a cottage, and it means the storage problem that ruins small houses was solved here before anyone moved in. Nothing inside has been corrected into neutrality. It still looks like the thing it was built to be.
Outside
The lot is the argument. More than 16,000 square feet of garden survives from the original plan, laid out in winding paths rather than a lawn with edges, and it runs to roughly eighteen times the footprint of the house. The brick patio handles the mornings. The water wheel handles everything else, turning at the center of the property and giving the garden a sound, which is the detail people remember first and describe worst. A separate storage shed and a detached two-car garage sit off the driveway, and the garage is the obvious studio or workshop for anyone who needs a room the house cannot spare. There is generous driveway parking, which is the least romantic luxury in Pasadena and the one people fight over. The garden was the point in 1910. It is still the point.
The O' Factor
Price per square foot is the wrong instrument here. $1,749 a foot reads as expensive right up until you notice you are paying for a garden and being handed a house at the end of it. That inversion is what makes this hard to compare to anything else on the market. Historic houses usually survive because they were grand enough to be worth the trouble of saving, and the grand ones get restored, photographed, and turned into arguments about civic memory. This one survived a different way. It was small enough to love and useful enough to actually live in, which is a far less reliable path through a century, and it has worked for a hundred and sixteen years without a break in it. The house was never the valuable part. It was the reason somebody stayed long enough to keep the garden.
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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
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“Sold off-market for $1,249 per square foot.”
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