Knocking on Heaven’s Doors

This is what some Pasadena homeowners do to get ready for 2,500 strangers to traipse through their historic houses:

They boil door hardware in baking soda solution.

They smear mortar around the bricks and river-rock on their driveway after letting the materials settle into the earth for one year.

They install burlap-backed, linseed-oil injected kitchen linoleum. They sand, they scrape, they stain. They research, they RESTORE.

And they do it all under intense deadline pressure. On Sunday, all the toil and labor came to an abrupt halt. By 11 a.m., hundreds of looky-loos were lining up outside their homes, eager to check out every little thing.

This is the annual home tour in Bungalow Heaven, a historic district of Craftsman homes. What started 15 years ago as a small seminar by the local historic society has grown into a full-blown, $15-ticket event, complete with souvenir programs, T-shirts, a slide show and home repair demonstrations.

But behind the scenes there’s been a little bit of hell to pay in Bungalow Heaven for weeks, if not months, as owners of the eight homes on display counted down to Sunday morning in a clean-it, fix-it frenzy.

At 10 p.m. Saturday, Marissa Davis and Tina Miller had only a few more cabinet doors to stain, part of a kitchen overhaul they undertook for the tour.

“Then we have to run the vacuum to pick up any last thing off the floors,” said Davis, eating takeout.

Patti Hayes was still in her pajamas at 9:55 Sunday morning, cleaning the kitchen. Earlier in the week, she embarked on a mission to suck away any trace of dust bunnies and borrowed her mother’s vacuum while a carpenter nailed the last of the new kitchen molding to the wall.

A few streets west, Roxana Moldinado spent the day leading up to the tour cleaning out her garage so she would have a place to stuff 12-month-old Graciella’s baby gear--two playpens, a romper-saucer, high chair, swing and a laundry basket packed with toys.

Marianne and Randall Hill, self-described Craftsman moderates, kept a running list of chores in anticipation of tour day.

Clean off the bubbles of sap oozing out of the porch post. Wash the bedspreads. Stow the stacks of debris on the bench seats. Remove family photos from the refrigerator. Randall has been gently rubbing down the living room woodwork with a mild alcohol solution to lighten but not destroy the stain.

But they were taking the home tour in stride. Marian admits to being a bit of rebel when it came to kitchen decor: pastel paint and blue tile.

“We live in a home, not a museum,” she said.

The houses are not mansions; they are, after all, bungalows. Their owners are not rich people, or even pretentious people. They are teachers, writers, artists, salesmen and counselors, regular working people.

But they live in something special, and they know it. Their 90-something-year-old houses are the local heart of a big and trendy national revival of the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 1900s.

Bungalow Heaven was the first residential neighborhood in Pasadena to be declared a landmark district and features one of the largest collections of bungalows in Southern California.

More than half of the 900 homes in the six-block district were influenced by architecture of the Arts and Crafts movement, said retired Pasadena City College professor Kennon Miedema, an expert on Pasadena history and a Bungalow Heaven resident.

Most of the homes were built from 1900 to 1920 and sold to middle-class people for $2,500 to $3,500. Today, add at least two zeros to the price.

The era was characterized by a strong sense of structure--big wood beams, long extending eaves, the use of local building materials like arroyo stones. The houses were supposed to look as if they emerged from the earth to blend with the San Gabriel mountains that are their backdrop, Miedema said.

Broad porches and windows made inside and outside feel like one environment. Simple and artful living became the mantra of the Craftsman lifestyle.

Not unlike the original Arts and Crafts movement, a rebuff of the negative impacts of the Industrial Revolution, today’s Craftsman homeowners like to talk about their purist motives.

They share a common loathing of aluminum framed windows, painted wood and stucco. They are saddened by the inevitable scourge of rafter tail rot. Hammered copper is good. Polished chrome is bad. Stained glass, good. Sliding glass doors, bad.

The neighborhood hero is Stucco Steve of Catalina Street. Suspicious of the outside design of his Spanish-style house, he not so long ago took a sledgehammer to his stucco. Turns out those front arches were phonies. His wrecking work ultimately revealed original wood-shingle siding and porch posts, cementing his place as one of the great preservationists of Bungalow Heaven.

“When you buy a house like this you are buying a lifestyle.” said Carla Schindler, an interior decorator whose home is on the tour. She used to live in stucco heaven, the Santa Clarita Valley, where tract homes rule. But her husband Brian made a Craftsman convert out of her.

“Now I can’t imagine ever moving from this house,” she said, with its wraparound porch, window seats and fine woodwork.

Brian Schindler is the homeowner obsessed with the new, but old-looking driveway that he finished days before the tour. He wanted the bricks to have a worn-down look before packing in the mortar. He laid a swath of river rock down the center of the driveway.

“I read that they would put river rock down the middle so the horses wouldn’t slip,” he explained.

On Sunday, tourists lined up on his driveway and along the sidewalk to see the Schindler house. Visitors oohed and ahhed over their Batchelder tile fireplace. One man got down on his hands and knees to look at the trestle woodwork beneath their dining room table.

“Do you know where those curtains come from?” a woman asked a docent. “I’ve been looking for period curtains that make sense and those are perfect.”

Brian didn’t hear the one comment that would have made him proud:

“Oh, will you look at that driveway,” said one woman. “It’s soooo neat.”

The reason the Schindlers and others open their doors to the ogling masses falls somewhere between flattery and obligation.

They were chosen by homeowner association leaders because their houses are well-preserved examples of Craftsman homes. The event is also a big fund-raiser for the neighborhood association, which has revitalized a park, gives money to the local school and library and has improved parkway landscaping.

Davis and Miller are Craftsman aficionados and have taken many home tours themselves. They read Old House Journal, display a Van Briggle vase in their living room and a Quoizel art glass chandelier hangs over their dining room table. They are the owners of a new Stickley leather-upholstered sofa and have a Morris chair on order.

“We are doing this because it’s really good for the neighborhood,” Davis said. And, explained Miller, it’s important for the association to capitalize on the popularity of the Arts and Crafts revival while they can.

Miller and Davis had their authentic linoleum laid on Tuesday. They had ordered a concrete composite kitchen counter called “Fireslate 2” from a small Maine workshop. It didn’t arrive in time for the tour, but they put a block of it on the stripped down counter for that work-in-progress effect.

“Corian and granite are not only very expensive, neither are period appropriate,” said Davis.

At 8:15 a.m. Sunday, a moving van pulled into Moldinado’s driveway.

A few neighbors hauled out her country-style dining room table and overstuffed denim upholstered chair. Straight from the showroom floor of Historic Lighting in Monrovia came a $3,500 Craftsman dining room table, six $800 chairs, a Morris chair and ottoman, a few antique lamps and some throw pillows.

Perfect. The rooms looked like any ol’ Sunday morning in 1913.

“I felt very self-conscious about my own furniture,” Moldinado said. “When the organizers told me a decorator would come in and loan me furniture, I was so relieved.”

Inside, her little two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow is the closest thing to a virgin home on the tour. She bought it two years ago from the 92-year-old daughter of the original owner. The handsome 1913 wainscoting, molding, built-in buffet and desk have never been defiled by a painter’s brush.

“It’s all kind of scary,” Moldinado said before the tour. “I mean, 2,000 people are going to walk through my house critiquing my personal belongings. I hope they appreciate it. I hope they don’t say, ‘She should have done this, she should have done that.’ ”

Moldinado fled the scene moments before the first tourists arrived. The passing house guests tip-toed through the house, commenting in hushed tones as the docent began his spiel. “There’s a lot of woodwork in this house, folks. All original. Never been painted,”

“Oh, lucky owner,” said one woman, stopping to take a close look at a baby photograph on the wall. “Cute baby, too. Great picture, like the sepia tone.”