There are houses that feel like they were built to keep the world out, and there are houses that feel like they were designed to bring it in. The John Norton House, tucked into a quiet pocket of Pasadena’s San Rafael neighborhood, belongs firmly to the latter. 

Built in 1954 by the celebrated architects Conrad Buff and Donald Hensman—whose mid-century designs helped shape the region’s residential identity—the 2,564-square-foot home is one of a dozen so-called “Bridge Houses” in the area, homes constructed literally over the running water. Here, as a staircase leads down from the street to the home, a natural spring-fed creek threads under the property, slips beneath a neighbor’s garage, and disappears into a ravine that leads to the Arroyo. 

The house is perched delicately over this narrow ribbon of water, inviting its soothing sound into every room.

Glenn and Maggie Rothner, who bought the home at 820 Burleigh Drive in 2011, recall first being seduced by that sound. Their son discovered the listing online—in the early days of Zillow and virtual tours—and insisted they go see it. Maggie remembers walking across the bridge for the first time, hearing the burble of the creek, and thinking, “This is Shangri-La.” 

Glenn’s first experience was even more disarming. Sitting on the living room couch with the window open, as he waited for a real estate agent, he promptly fell asleep. “It was so relaxing,” he recalls. “I wasn’t even trying.”

The Norton House was built when the USC School of Architecture, where Buff and Hensman trained, was championing the idea of dissolving the barrier between interior and exterior space. The architects’ solution was to design homes that seemed almost porous, stretching sightlines toward the horizon, capturing breeze and birdsong, and creating an impression of more space than the modest square footage would suggest. 

“It gives you a feeling of greater space and volume,” Glenn says, pointing to the home’s ribbon windows and transoms. From nearly every room, one can glimpse or hear the stream.

The Rothners have spent much of the past fourteen years carefully stewarding the property’s architectural integrity while adapting it to modern life. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and benefits from the Mills Act, which grants tax relief in exchange for preservation. That status has guided their choices. 

When they excavated the low crawlspace beneath the house to create a guest suite, they worked with an architectural historian who advised them not to mimic the original upstairs design.

“She said, ‘You may not do that,’” Glenn recalls. “Because then you’re passing off what you did as something original.” Instead, they embraced the opportunity to go contemporary—polished concrete floors, a single-piece concrete sink, floating toilet. The contrast between upstairs and downstairs feels intentional, even celebratory.

Other interventions have been more subtle: a reimagined front approach, replacing a steep switchback with fan-tail steps that make the house feel both grander and more welcoming; a backyard regraded to handle heavy rains; vegetable and flower beds replacing a slope of invasive ivy. Inside, the kitchen and dining space still feature the built-in table and fireplace design Buff and Hensman conceived as a single sculptural gesture, including the slightly awkward notch they had to cut into the table to make it open properly—a rare but charming error in an otherwise precise composition.

What gives the house its most enduring character, though, may be its intimacy with water. “You can hear the stream throughout the house,” Maggie says. “It’s constant.” That constancy is part of the home’s quiet drama: a reminder that nature is not just scenery here but a participant. In a city full of architectural treasures, the John Norton House stands out as a place where structure and setting are so deeply entwined that to live here is to live not just in a house, but in a carefully composed collaboration between wood, glass, and water.

The John Norton House is currently exclusively listed by George Penner at Compass. For more, visit www.820Burleigh.com.