On a corner of East Pine Street in Altadena, Kenneth Wood is sleeping under his own roof again. Forty years on that property, but then in a single night it was gone. The Eaton Fire took his house and almost everything in it on Jan. 7, 2025, when a powerful Santa Ana wind event turned a brush fire in Eaton Canyon, above Altadena, into the fifth-deadliest and second-most destructive wildfire in California history.
Wood’s new home — built in roughly five months by San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity, the first organization to secure a rebuilding permit in the Altadena area — was finished in late March. He has spoken about it carefully, the way people do when grief is still close.
“People will never understand what it means to be able to live on that corner again,” he said.
On Sunday, April 26, 2026, eight other front doors will swing open for a different reason. The 35th Annual Bungalow Heaven Home Tour returns to the streets of Pasadena’s first historic landmark district after a one-year hiatus — and for the first time in the tour’s 35-year history, the proceeds will benefit a charitable partner outside the neighborhood: San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity, the Monrovia-based affiliate now leading the rebuilding effort in Altadena.
A neighborhood that closed for grief
The Bungalow Heaven Neighborhood Association, the all-volunteer 501 nonprofit civic league that has run the tour every year since June 3, 1990, made the call early to step aside in 2025.
What would have been the 2025 tour planning season instead became a season of relief work.
At least one renter inside the Bungalow Heaven historic district itself was displaced by fire-related toxic ash contamination.
“The annual event took a pause in 2025, out of respect for those in Altadena, Pasadena and Sierra Madre who were affected by the Eaton Fire,” Annette Yasin, the association’s president, said. “The neighborhood’s volunteer efforts were refocused toward helping fire-impacted friends and neighbors throughout the entire year through various community projects.”
Skipping a year of the tour was no small thing.
The Bungalow Heaven Home Tour is the association’s largest annual fundraiser and its flagship public event — the one weekend each year when more than 800 small Craftsman homes built between roughly 1900 and 1930 become a kind of open-air museum. The tour has been held every year since 1990 with only two interruptions before 2025: 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down, and 2021, when it returned in a virtual format.
Two organizations, both turning 36
There is a small coincidence at the heart of this year’s tour. The Bungalow Heaven Neighborhood Association ran its first home tour in June 1990. San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity, an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International based in Monrovia, was formally founded that same year, after an organizing meeting on May 18, 1989, at St. Andrew’s School in Pasadena.
Both organizations are 36 years old in 2026. They are partnering for the first time.
“San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity has been building homes in the area for 36 years, and partnering with neighbors has always been at the center of the work,” said Michael Bridges, the organization’s senior director of development.
“Together with supporters throughout the community, SGV Habitat is currently helping to build homes for families whose homes were lost in Altadena. The generosity of visitors on the Bungalow Heaven Home Tour this year can help more families get back home more quickly.”
Visitors will be asked to add a donation to San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity at the point of ticket purchase, and a portion of all tour proceeds will be donated as well.
The organization, which is led by Chief Executive Bryan Wong, has committed to rebuilding 25 homes lost in the Eaton Fire and is raising money toward 100. More than 800 displaced families have already reached out for help. In June 2025, the Altadena Builds Back Foundation awarded San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity a $4.55 million grant to rebuild 22 homes in West Altadena. Nine additional houses were under construction as of late March.
The first of forty
Bungalow Heaven occupies roughly one square mile — 16 blocks of north-central Pasadena bounded, more or less, by Orange Grove Boulevard on the north, Washington Boulevard on the south, Lake Avenue on the west and Mentor and Chester avenues on the east. Within those lines stand 522 buildings the National Park Service has designated as historically contributing, the largest intact grouping of working-class Arts and Crafts-era housing in Pasadena.
The name itself was an accident. A Pasadena city planner coined “Bungalow Heaven” in the mid-1970s, almost casually, and the residents kept it.
On Nov. 14, 1989, the Pasadena Board of Directors voted to make the neighborhood the city’s first Landmark District, after homeowners petitioned for the designation by majority vote. Pasadena has 40 Landmark Districts today. Bungalow Heaven was the prototype.
The federal government followed nearly two decades later. On April 10, 2008, the United States Department of the Interior added the Bungalow Heaven Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.
In 2009, the American Planning Association named it one of the “10 Great Places in America.”
Even while the 2025 tour was on hiatus, the district was quietly growing. On June 16, 2025, the Pasadena City Council unanimously approved amendments to the Bungalow Heaven Conservation Plan that extended the district’s official period of significance to 1885 through 1956 and reclassified 67 additional homes as historically significant — newly eligible for Mills Act contracts that reduce property taxes for owners who maintain historic character.
The houses on Sunday’s route now stand inside a slightly larger historic envelope than they did the last time the tour was held.
Eight homes, one square mile, no high heels
Sunday’s tour is self-guided and covers the interiors of eight homes, with trained volunteer docents stationed in each. The architectural styles span the district’s full range — Victorian (1885 through 1906), Arts and Crafts (1903 through 1923), Period Revival (1915 through 1939), and Minimal Traditional and Ranchette homes built between 1930 and 1956. The brothers Charles and Henry Greene, whose Pasadena practice helped define the American Craftsman house, are closely associated with the style that gives the neighborhood its character.
Along the walking route, restoration experts will demonstrate period-appropriate work — the kind of detail that turns a curious visitor into a homeowner who understands why a 100-year-old window sash is worth saving. McDonald Park, at 1000 East Mountain Street, will host live music, homemade cookies, food trucks and a silent auction throughout the day.
The house rules are unsentimental and a little revealing: No high heels inside the homes. No photography. No food or drink. No smoking. No strollers. No dogs. (These are private residences whose owners have agreed, for one day, to let strangers walk their floors.)
Advance tickets are $25 through 8 p.m. Saturday, April 25, 2026, at bungalowheaven.org. Day-of tickets are $30, available at McDonald Park beginning at 9:40 a.m. The tour runs 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For comparison, tickets to the very first Bungalow Heaven Home Tour on June 3, 1990, cost $10 for adults, $7 for association members and $5 for seniors.
What a $25 ticket builds
The Wood family home on East Pine Street, where construction began Oct. 16, 2025, is the proof of concept the tour organizers will be pointing to on Sunday. It went up in roughly five months. The Woods are back in it. The family is one of 25 SGV Habitat has committed to.
Bryan Wong, the organization’s chief executive, has framed the work in terms broader than lumber and drywall.
“This is not just about rebuilding homes — it’s about restoring hope, stability, and a future,” he said. “These homes represented generations of resilience and legacy. With this support, families can begin to rebuild more than walls — they will rebuild lives.”
On Sunday, eight homeowners in Bungalow Heaven will throw open rooms preserved across more than a century of California life. The neighbors they are helping live a few miles north, in Altadena, where families displaced by the fire are still working their way back through SGV Habitat’s rebuild pipeline.
Yasin’s pitch is gentler than that, and broader.
“Whether you’re a history buff, an architecture enthusiast or simply looking for a day of leisurely exploration,” she said, “this event offers something for everyone to enjoy.”
IF YOU GO
What: 35th Annual Bungalow Heaven Home Tour
When: Sunday, April 26, 2026, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Start at McDonald Park, 1000 East Mountain Street, Pasadena, CA 91104
Tickets: $25 advance through 8 p.m. Saturday, April 25, 2026, at bungalowheaven.org; $30 day-of at McDonald Park, beginning 9:40 a.m.
Beneficiary: San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity Eaton Fire rebuild program (sgvhabitat.org/
Bring: Water, sunscreen, comfortable walking shoes.
Leave at home: High heels, cameras, food, dogs, strollers.
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