If you went to the Bungalow Heaven Home Tour back in April, you might already feel like you've had your fill of walking through other people's century-old living rooms this year. That instinct is going to cost you. The tour that opens this month is not a rerun. It is not even the same kind of event, and the two get confused constantly because they share a word: Craftsman.
Pasadena Heritage's Craftsman Week runs October 11 through 18, and the homes on this year's list are not the ones you saw in Bungalow Heaven. They are the ones that almost never open at all.
Two traditions, one shared vocabulary
The Bungalow Heaven Home Tour is a neighborhood event. It has run every spring since 1990, organized by the volunteer-run Bungalow Heaven Neighborhood Association, and it walks visitors through the interiors of eight homes inside the district bounded by the city's first Landmark District, designated in 1989. This year's edition, the 35th, took place on April 26 and marked a return after a one-year hiatus following the Eaton Fire. For the first time in the tour's history, proceeds went outside the neighborhood entirely, benefiting San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity's work rebuilding homes lost in Altadena. Tickets ran $25 in advance, the tour was self-guided, and volunteer docents stood in each doorway to talk architecture and restoration with anyone who stopped to ask.
Craftsman Week is a different animal. It is run by Pasadena Heritage, a preservation nonprofit, not a neighborhood association, and it is built around individually owned architectural landmarks that do not belong to any walkable district. You cannot stroll past the Robert R. Blacker House on a Sunday afternoon and see the inside the way you can with a Bungalow Heaven bungalow. It is a private residence. The only way in is through an event like this one.
The homes that don't otherwise open
This year's Craftsman Week gives ticket holders rare access to two of Pasadena's most significant Greene & Greene homes: the Blacker House, built in 1907, and the Duncan-Irwin House, an early Greene & Greene commission dating to 1906. Neither is part of a public tour circuit. The Blacker House tour is being led by glass artist John Hamm, who has spent years recreating original art glass that was removed from the house long before current preservation standards existed. That is not a docent reading from a script. That is someone who has held the missing pieces in his hands and had to reproduce what was lost.
The Gamble House, Pasadena's best-known Greene & Greene landmark and a National Historic Landmark since 1908, is contributing its own programming this year, including a Details & Joinery Tour led by Jim Ipekjian, a master woodworker who has spent more than 50 years building custom furniture and woodwork in the Greene & Greene tradition. There is a separate Metalwork Tour digging into the hand-forged hardware that defines the house's interiors. Judson Studios, the stained glass workshop still producing work in Pasadena today, is opening its doors for a behind-the-scenes look as well.
None of this overlaps with what Bungalow Heaven showed you in April. That tour was about a neighborhood of preserved bungalows built between 1885 and 1956, spanning Victorian, Arts and Crafts, and Period Revival styles, recently confirmed by a Pasadena City Council vote in June 2025 that extended the district's official period of significance. Craftsman Week is about the handful of architecturally singular structures that sit outside any district, protected individually, and rarely seen by anyone who isn't a Pasadena Heritage ticket holder.
Where the two events actually touch
There is one overlap worth knowing about. Craftsman Week includes a walking tour of the Bungalow Heaven Landmark District, but it is not the same experience as April's Home Tour. This one moves through the streets rather than into living rooms, tracing the district's history as Pasadena's first Landmark District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008 and named one of the American Planning Association's "10 Great Places in America" the following year. If you want to see the fireplaces and built-ins up close, April is your window. If you want to understand how the neighborhood came together as a place, October gives you that instead.
The week also includes a walking tour through South Marengo, a district listed on the National Register since 1982, with exclusive interior access to two restored Craftsman homes now occupied by the Institute for Educational Advancement. That is another set of doors that stay closed the rest of the year.
The people doing the explaining make the difference
Pasadena Heritage's own Programs Director, Nick Giovanazzi, has been direct about what sets this year apart, pointing to the Blacker House access alongside an evening reception at the home as the anchor of the 2026 lineup. Executive Director Dr. Bridget Lawlor has framed the week around the idea that these homes carry values of craftsmanship and community that still matter now, not just as museum pieces from a century ago.
Preservation advocate Brett Waterman, known for hosting the television series "Restored," is delivering this year's keynote lecture, followed by a reception at the Blinn House, which happens to be Pasadena Heritage's own headquarters. The Blinn House is itself a 1906 Prairie-style residence with its own layered history, having served as home to the Women's City Club through the 1940s before becoming the organization's base.
There is also a tile-focused program pairing artist Cha-Rie Tang, founder of Pasadena Craftsman Tile, with a conversation moderated by Jeannette O'Malley, Executive Director of the Pasadena Museum of History. Save The Tiles, a preservation effort founded by Eric Garland, is presenting a mini-exhibit alongside it featuring tiles rescued from the Eaton Fire. That detail connects Craftsman Week to something bigger than architecture appreciation. Pasadena's preservation community spent the past year and a half doing recovery work as much as celebration work, and this year's programming carries that thread through it.
What this actually costs you if you wait
Member pre-sale for Craftsman Week opened August 18 and general sale opened September 1. Events have been selling out quickly since then, according to Pasadena Heritage's own reporting. Last year's Craftsman Week drew more than 1,200 visitors across the region, and this year's eight-day format with headline access to the Blacker House suggests the demand will be at least as strong. If a specific tour matters to you, particularly the Blacker House or Duncan-Irwin House events, the smart move is checking Pasadena Heritage's Craftsman Week page now rather than in the second week of October.
None of this requires you to be house-hunting or even mildly interested in real estate. It requires only that you live somewhere with this kind of concentration of Arts and Crafts history and want to actually see it instead of just walking past the plaques. Pasadena became one of the movement's most significant American centers precisely because Charles and Henry Greene built here, and Craftsman Week is the one stretch of the year when that legacy stops being something you drive past and becomes something you can walk into.
If living around this kind of architecture is part of why you love this city, and you ever find yourself wondering what a home in one of these Craftsman-era pockets is actually worth on today's market, that's a different conversation for a different day. For now, Alex Lozano will just say: get your tickets before the Blacker House sells out, and if you want to talk about Pasadena's historic housing stock beyond this one week in October, let's connect.
