The Baldwin Oaks Estate is ready to shine as the 2026 Pasadena Showcase House of Design. [Eddie Rivera/Pasadena Now]
In one upstairs room, Julie Kennedy stands amid a softly glowing fairytale world she and her twin sister, Jeanine Hattas Wilson, have conjured out of paint, light, and memory. “This is our first year having our own space,” she says, still sounding slightly surprised by it. “Yeah, it’s very exciting.”
The room is a kind of secret refuge imagined for Clara Baldwin as a child—a place to “hide away and read her fairytales,” Kennedy explains. Floor-to-ceiling panels bloom with scenes of Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and Goldilocks, though look closer and the figures begin to shift. The homeowner’s children, and now grandchildren, have been quietly written into the story.
“It’s all about the details,” Kennedy says, pointing to a mirror where the house itself appears, tucked into the narrative like an Easter egg. Behind the panels, twinkle lights flicker. Fiber optics scatter stars. A projected moon hovers above dried flowers suspended from the ceiling, forming what she calls “a floating garden.”
The effect is immersive, but also interactive. Black lanterns embedded in the walls trigger audio when touched—snippets of fairytales spoken aloud. “So that if a child can’t read, they can come in and still hear their fairytales,” Kennedy says. One voice, she admits with a laugh, is her own. “That’s my voice.”
Like many rooms in the house, the space reflects not just a design concept but a personal one. “If we had the space, this is what we would have wanted,” she says. “Usually we’re used to working with clients. Here we got to do whatever we wanted to do.”
That freedom, however, comes with its own hazard. “The challenge with not having a client was it was hard to know when to stop,” she says. “We were just like, let’s do this, then we can do that. And we did. We did it all.”
Down the hall, that same compressed timeline—months of work distilled into a few breathless weeks—has left its mark on nearly every designer.
“I realized I could probably work a lot faster than I ever thought I could,” says Carla Lane, reflecting on the pace of the project, which gathers dozens of designers under one roof, each responsible for a distinct vision.
Ronnie Gor of Amorphous Studio, who took on a primary suite—bedroom, bathroom, and closet—began with a single idea: a color called “midnight garden.” From there came birds, everywhere.
“You see these birds appearing everywhere,” she says. “Flying through the room.” The motif, she adds, suggests “fluidity of life… uplifting, touch the sky, if you can.”
It is a sentiment that seems to echo through the house as finishing touches are placed, stepped back from, and occasionally reworked one last time. There is, everywhere, the quiet choreography of completion: a pillow straightened, a light adjusted, a final sweep of the eye.
And yet, even now, the instinct to continue lingers.
“The hardest part,” Kennedy says, smiling, “is knowing when to stop. Someone take the paper away.”
By Sunday, of course, the decision will no longer belong to the designers. The doors will open, the rooms will fill, and the Baldwin Oaks Estate—after months of private imagination—will become, all at once, quite public.
The 2026 Pasadena Showcase House of Design at the Baldwin Oaks Estate opens to the public on Sunday, April 19, 2026 .
This is the 61st annual Showcase House, and public tours run from April 19 through May 17, 2026 . The estate is located in Arcadia, California . Tour hours are Tuesday–Thursday and Saturday–Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (Mondays are closed for tours) . Tickets can be purchased at pasadenashowcase.org or by calling (626) 606-1600 .
