A Guide to Home Architecture Across the San Gabriel Valley

Kitchen By Design has worked across Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley for three generations, and one thing holds true across every city we serve: the right kitchen or bathroom design depends on the house it's going into. A Spanish Colonial Revival home in San Marino and a Craftsman bungalow in Sierra Madre call for genuinely different design decisions, not the same layout in a different paint color. Here's what actually dominates each of these five communities, and what it tends to mean for a remodel.

San Marino: Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival

San Marino is almost entirely single-family homes built between the 1920s and 1960s, in Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean Revival, American Colonial Revival, and Tudor Revival styles, many on generous lots originally designed by architects like Wallace Neff and Roland Coate. Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean homes here lean toward white-washed stucco, terracotta tile roofs, wrought iron, and symmetrical facades built around courtyards.

A kitchen remodel in a home like this usually means working with arched openings, thick stucco walls, and a roofline that limits where new venting or windows can go, plus finding tile and hardware that reads as authentically Spanish or Mediterranean rather than generically "Tuscan."

Arcadia: A Mix of Ranch, Colonial, and Contemporary

Arcadia is more varied than its neighbors. Established blocks lean Colonial, Traditional, and Ranch, with the Santa Anita Village area, developed mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, holding a concentration of English cottages, traditional ranch homes, and early American Revival styles. Elsewhere in the city, newer contemporary rebuilds with clean lines and indoor-outdoor layouts sit alongside that historic stock.

That mix means Arcadia remodels often start with a real assessment of the specific home rather than an assumed style. A single-story ranch generally has more flexibility for an open-concept kitchen than a 1930s English cottage does, where smaller, more defined rooms are often part of the original character worth keeping.

South Pasadena: Craftsman and Mid-Century

South Pasadena is defined by Craftsman and mid-century homes, with tree-lined streets holding a high concentration of designated historic landmarks. Craftsman homes here typically feature deep porches, low gabled rooflines, exposed structural beams, and natural materials like redwood shingle and river rock, following the same Arts and Crafts tradition that shaped much of the western San Gabriel Valley in the early 1900s.

In a Craftsman kitchen, that usually translates to built-in cabinetry, quarter-sawn or white oak, and hardware and lighting that match the home's original joinery, rather than a stock cabinet line dropped into an old floor plan. Mid-century homes in the same city call for a different vocabulary entirely: clean horizontal lines, larger glazing, and a kitchen that opens directly onto the backyard.

La Cañada Flintridge: The Most Architecturally Diverse

La Cañada Flintridge is the most architecturally diverse of the five, with Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean and Italian Renaissance, Monterey Revival, Neoclassical, Tudor, Colonial, Cape Cod, Craftsman, and Minimal Traditional homes all represented, alongside a strong layer of postwar and mid-century ranch homes in neighborhoods like Alta Canyada and around Descanso Drive.

Like Arcadia, there's no single default style here, which is exactly why we treat every remodel as its own project rather than a template. What works for a Monterey Revival two-story doesn't necessarily work for the ranch house two doors down.

Sierra Madre: One of the Valley's Deepest Craftsman Concentrations

Sierra Madre has one of the densest concentrations of Craftsman bungalows in the San Gabriel Valley, with more than 50 homes formally recognized as historic, most built between the late 1800s and 1930. The city's Craftsman identity runs deep enough that American Bungalow magazine, a driving force behind the national revival of interest in bungalow architecture, was founded there in 1990.

Remodeling a Sierra Madre bungalow kitchen well usually means respecting a small original footprint rather than fighting it: built-in breakfast nooks, period-appropriate tile (Batchelder-style work shows up often in this era), and cabinetry proportioned to a house that was never meant to have a great room.

What This Means If You're Planning a Remodel

None of this is trivia. A design-build team that doesn't know the difference between a Sierra Madre bungalow and a La Cañada Flintridge ranch will design the same kitchen for both, and it will look wrong in at least one of them. If your home doesn't fit neatly into any of these five cities, the same principle still applies, including in Altadena, where Craftsman, Spanish Revival, and mid-century homes are being rebuilt right now. The style of the house should shape the design, not the other way around.