Pasadena Los Angeles: Rose Bowl, Museums and Craftsman Architecture

Pasadena sits at the eastern edge of the Los Angeles Basin at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, a city of 140,000 that maintains such a distinct civic identity — centred on the Rose Bowl stadium, the California Institute of Technology, and one of the finest concentrations of Craftsman bungalow architecture in the world — that many Angelenos treat it as a separate destination rather than part of the sprawling metropolitan area. The city's Old Town Pasadena precinct, a dozen blocks of restored Victorian and Mission Revival commercial buildings along Colorado Boulevard, represents one of the most successful main-street retail revivals in American urban history, combining independent restaurants and bookshops with national brands in a genuinely walkable environment.

The Norton Simon Museum is one of the finest private art collections in the United States, assembled by industrialist Norton Simon over decades of obsessive acquisition that brought together European old masters — Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Degas, Picasso — with an exceptional collection of Southeast Asian sculpture spanning two millennia. The museum's garden, designed in the manner of Monet's Giverny, contains outdoor sculpture and a reflective pond that makes it one of the most pleasant places in Southern California to spend an afternoon. The nearby Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino — technically a separate municipality — extends the cultural itinerary with 120 acres of themed gardens, a collection of rare manuscripts including a Gutenberg Bible, and British and American paintings of the first rank.

The Rose Bowl stadium, home to UCLA's football team and legendary concerts, hosts the Rose Bowl Flea Market on the second Sunday of each month — one of the great outdoor markets in America, drawing 2,500 vendors and 20,000 buyers for a day of vintage furniture, clothing, art, jewellery and the particular California miscellany that makes flea market culture here uniquely absorbing. The Craftsman architecture that defines Pasadena's residential neighbourhoods — the Greene and Greene masterworks of the Gamble House and Blacker House in particular — represents the apex of an American vernacular building tradition whose influence continues to shape domestic architecture a century after its peak.