"We are thrilled to once again be offering this experience," Pasadena Heritage Programs Director Nick Giovanazzi said last week, previewing what he called "an incredible lineup of events" for this year's Craftsman Week. If you have lived in Pasadena for more than a few years, that quote probably conjures the wrong picture. You are likely thinking of a single Sunday afternoon, docents on porches, five or six historic homes open for a few hours before everyone goes home. That version of Craftsman Week is not what is happening this October.
Craftsman Week 2026 runs October 11 through 18. Eight days. Five partner institutions. Houses that almost never open to the public at all, let alone on the same calendar. The reader who shows up expecting one afternoon of house-touring is going to miss most of what actually happens.
The Weekend You Remember Doesn't Exist Anymore
For more than three decades, Pasadena Heritage's fall celebration of the Arts and Crafts movement was built around a single signature event: the Sunday Craftsman House Tour. It was popular enough to sell out most years, but it was still, structurally, a weekend program run by one organization.
That changed after Pasadena Heritage brought on a new interim executive director, Zoot Velasco, who arrived in December 2024 and spent his first 90 days doing what he called a "lay of the land" review. The message from the board and longtime supporters was consistent: bring Craftsman Weekend back. Velasco's answer was to bring it back bigger. He expanded the program from a weekend into an eight-day festival and pulled in four new partners the event had never worked with before: the Gamble House, the Pasadena Museum of History, Judson Studios, and Old California Lighting. The model he pointed to explicitly was Palm Springs Modernism Week, a festival built on the same idea of one city's architectural identity sustaining a full week of programming rather than a single open house.
The gamble paid off. Craftsman Week 2025 drew more than 1,200 visitors from across the region, and several events sold out. This year, under new Executive Director Dr. Bridget Lawlor, who took over the role after 15 years as a preservation officer in Riverside County, the expanded format is back with its full roster of partners intact.
What Eight Days Actually Contains
This is the part that gets lost if you are still picturing the old Sunday tour. The 2026 lineup includes rare interior access to two of the most significant Greene and Greene houses in the country, plus a spread of programming that has nothing to do with walking through a living room.
Confirmed for this year:
- Interior and exterior access to the Blacker House (1907), with an evening reception at the home
- Interior access to the Duncan-Irwin House, another Greene and Greene design
- A behind-the-scenes visit to Judson Studios, the stained glass workshop that has been producing art glass in Los Angeles since before either the Blacker or Gamble houses were built
- A Details and Joinery Tour at the Gamble House led by master woodworker Jim Ipekjian
- An exterior tour of the Lanterman House, the 1915 Craftsman home built of reinforced concrete for Dr. Roy and Emily Lanterman, led by Craftsman-era historian John Ripley
- A tour of Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena
- A private evening event at a residence Pasadena Heritage is calling the Magic House, described as a once-in-a-lifetime opening of a home in one of Pasadena's most sought-after neighborhoods
- The South Marengo Walking Tour, with rare interior access to two restored Craftsman bungalows now used by the Institute of Educational Advancement
- A walk through Bungalow Heaven, the neighborhood that became Pasadena's first landmark district built around this style of architecture, in 1989
- The Ford Place Walking Tour, which includes an interior visit to the Blinn House, a 1906 Prairie-style residence at 160 N. Oakland Ave that now serves as Pasadena Heritage's own headquarters
- A Flea Market and Craft Fair with vendors selling Craftsman-style goods, vintage pieces, and sustainably made home items
None of this requires you to already own a piece of Pasadena's architectural history. It requires knowing the week exists and picking which parts of it fit your schedule, because there is no longer a single Sunday you can circle on the calendar and call it done.
Why the Houses on This List Are the Ones That Matter
Pasadena's claim to the Arts and Crafts movement is not incidental. Charles and Henry Greene practiced here, and the Blacker House and the Gamble House, completed in 1907 and 1908, are considered among the finest examples of the style ever built anywhere in the country. That is not local boosterism. It is the reason a preservation organization can build an eight-day festival around a handful of blocks and still have more material than it can fit into the schedule.
The neighborhoods on this year's tour list carry their own weight, too. Bungalow Heaven earned its landmark status in 1989 specifically because it preserved an intact concentration of early twentieth century Craftsman homes, not individual showpieces but a whole streetscape of them. South Marengo did something similar and was listed on the National Register in 1982, protected in part through the same preservation efforts that helped found Pasadena Heritage in the first place. These are not one-off house museums. They are living neighborhoods where residents still occupy the homes on the tour, which is part of why interior access is limited and worth planning around rather than assuming.
If You Cannot Clear Eight Days
Most people cannot. The organizers seem to know this, which is why the schedule is not built as one continuous event but as a set of standalone entries you can pick from individually. The walking tours (South Marengo, Bungalow Heaven, Ford Place) tend to run a few hours and work well as a single weekend outing on their own. The house-specific events, the Blacker House evening reception and the Duncan-Irwin House tour especially, are the ones likely to sell out first, since they involve homes that are not normally open to visitors at all.
Dr. Lawlor framed this year's celebration as recognition that the values behind the Arts and Crafts movement, craftsmanship, community, and a house built in harmony with the land around it, are not just historical curiosities but part of what still makes these neighborhoods worth walking through. That is a fair description of what has actually changed about Craftsman Week. It used to be a nice afternoon. It is now a genuine argument, made across eight days and five institutions, for why this particular six square miles of Pasadena still sets the standard for the style everywhere else.
Full details and tickets are available directly through Pasadena Heritage's Craftsman Week page.
If the architecture on this list has you looking twice at the Craftsman bungalows and landmark districts around your own block, our team has written more about what makes Pasadena's historic districts and their Craftsman homes distinct from one neighborhood to the next. And if a week spent walking through Bungalow Heaven or South Marengo leaves you wondering what it would take to actually live inside one of these houses, Thomas Atamian + Associates has spent years working in exactly this part of Pasadena's market and is glad to talk through it, no obligation attached.
