American dreamers
A young couple paints a picture of familial bliss in a Pasadena fixer-upper
By Joanna Beresford 05/07/2009
Just north of Bungalow Heaven in Pasadena lies an oak-shrouded neighborhood lined with picket fences and lamp posts where birds sing and fathers run alongside their children’s tricycles at dusk. April Goodwin, a third generation Pasadenan, her husband Chris, and their two babies — 3-year-old Grant and Maryn, 18 months — have made this neighborhood their home for almost six years. Their seemingly effortless progress from condo-for-couples, to tiny first home, and then to a more spacious second home, represents a near-perfect trajectory toward the American Dream.
Chris and April met in college and dated sporadically for 10 years before marrying, a move that April describes as an “easy transition.” Their first home was a townhouse on Madison Avenue in Pasadena. An ideal place for a young couple to start life together, the apartment was located in an area where they could “walk to everything.” Today their bucolic nest is more remote — because, well, “life is so different now,” April says. Young parents don’t need easy access to food, shopping and cocktails quite the same way a young couple might. But, according to April, the sacrifice isn’t painful; to the contrary, Chris and April express a mutual and quiet joy when they describe their present lifestyle.
“We had big plans when we moved into the apartment,” says April. “We wanted to buy a house within a year.” In the first instance of their happy clamber through the rites of married and family life, Chris and April found a two-bedroom, one-bath, 975-square foot house within the allotted year.
The house had good bones and radiant light, says April, but required a lot of work before they could call it home. Through a creative hodgepodge of family (April’s brother is a painter, another relative does electrical work), friends and referrals, the Goodwins gutted the bathroom, repainted almost every wall and surface, and overhauled the plumbing before they moved into their little nest. Over the following months and years they refinished the wood floors and improved the air conditioning and electrical systems.
“I kind of like the process,” April says. “There’s always something new around you.” They also added a row of delicate white rose bushes along the rear wall of the back yard and a coterie of white Adirondack chairs. When I visited the home one evening in the midst of their move, I stood on the back stoop and watched the chairs and roses glow with moonlight. I couldn’t imagine how the Goodwins could ever leave their little paradise.
“I really love this house,” April confessed, with the fondness of farewell in her tone.
The next time I talked to her she was at her mother’s house, where the family will stay for several months while they resuscitate the new home. April and Chris have walked the neighborhood for years, making friends, and more recently keeping their eyes open for a house that would provide more space for their growing family. When the house-around-the-corner became available, a neighbor introduced the Goodwins to the seller.
“It felt like it was meant to be,” says April.
The lessons they learned in renovating the first home will serve them well as they strip kitchen and baths to their bones and start anew. More painting will follow, and salvaging wood floors, adding new carpets.
So, from townhouse to tiny house, to more ample residence, what, I asked April, remains the same? What makes each of these buildings a home, their home?
“It sounds cheesy,” says April, “but I really think it’s about our little family growing under one roof, enjoying our time here. Color and light are really important to me, but I think it’s the living there, eating and playing and sleeping there that makes it feel like home.”
Presiding over their home from the beginning has been a reproduction of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” Chris bought the painting for April early on in their dating days, she says, and she thinks it’s a proper symbol for the romance and emotion of their lives. Produced in 1908, during Klimt’s “golden phase,” the portrait of man and woman in an embrace depicts what critics have described as the redemptive, transformative power of love. Love in all its mystery and simplicity reign over and within the Goodwin home the way flashes of gold and splashes of color reign in their favorite painting.
Contact Joanna at truewrite@yahoo.com.
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What a great article! What a perfect couple!
Aaron