Bungalow Court

This was a 1924 Craftsman with a collapsed rear wing and a tenant of forty years in the front two rooms. Rowan & Pell were hired to demolish it. They talked the owner out of that over the course of a single afternoon. What survives is the entire street-facing volume: the deep porch, the two front rooms, and the clay tile roof above them, which was lifted, re-laid over new steel, and put back. The brick is original and was repointed in lime rather than cement, on the grounds that the wall needs to breathe more than it needs to be strong. The new work is all at the back and is unmistakably new: a double-height kitchen and dining volume in plain gray block, with a steel stair to two bedrooms above. The junction between old and new is a glazed slot, a foot wide, running floor to roof. You can stand in it and touch 1924 with one hand and 2017 with the other. The encaustic cement tiles in the front rooms are original and about sixty percent intact; the replacements were made to match and are noticeably brighter. The architects chose not to distress them. In ten years the difference will have closed on its own. Pasadena will not permit building like this again. The lot coverage rules no longer allow it and the crews who can lay a tile roof this way are now a list of about four names. What is here is here.