Art and Architecture

Because our day-to-day lives tend toward the hectic, my wife and I have increasingly become fans of what we call “mini-vacs,” weekend-long vacations that give us the respite we need. What we’ve become less enamored of is going through airports to take them.

Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, to find the same things we travel for--museums, architecture, bookstores, good restaurants--in a place we’d not properly explored and without getting on an airplane to do it? No worries about what to wear for the weather, packing to fit a small carry-on bag, or the infernal question of how much insurance to take on the rental car. And we wouldn’t even need to limit our purchases to what we could carry back on the plane. The only question was where to go.

The Norton Simon Museum of Art made that decision easy by renovating its 51,000 square feet for the first time since 1975, making a trip imperative. Why not Pasadena? Though we’d visited it sporadically, we’d never really examined the place, and there were all kinds of other spots in Pasadena I’d been eager to look into. Best of all, it was less than an hour from our home on the coast. My wife, Patty, and I could toss anything we wanted into the car, from brie and champagne to some oversize art books I’d been meaning to browse, and never look back.

For our home away from home, we chose the five-room Bissell House, advertised as “restored Victorian elegance on Pasadena’s historical Millionaire’s Row” (at the southern foot of Orange Grove Boulevard in South Pasadena) partly because we liked the idea of its connection to vacuum cleaner magnate Melville Bissell (it belonged to his daughter). And we did discover a pair of ancient Bissells on the premises, “The Ideal” and “Grand Rapids,” complete with “hi-lo ball bearings,” and both looking ready to clean at a moment’s notice.

Our room, the Prince Albert, was cozy and overstuffed, containing a queen-size bed with a large, carved French antique headboard, lots of rugs and seven electric light sources. But the Bissell House’s 40-foot hedge notwithstanding, the traffic noise from Orange Grove Boulevard was more than we’d bargained for. Fortunately, the room came equipped with a noise-buster to create ambient sound. We rejected settings like “heartbeat” and “soft sound” before settling on the more conventional “rain,” leading to a lot of banter on the order of “It’s really coming down” and “I hope it clears up by tomorrow.”

For dinner on Friday, we decided to have our splurge meal of the weekend at Shiro in South Pasadena, a restaurant we’d heard about but had never made time to visit. It’s a cool, elegant space a scant five minutes from the Bissell, and it’s known for its wonderfully seasoned deep-fried catfish. I felt unadventurous ordering what everyone orders, but as soon as I tasted it, it was clear why it was the dish of choice.

Given that the museums we wanted to visit weren’t open until noon, we spent Saturday morning visiting a pair of bookstores, across the street from each other on Washington Boulevard, that form one of the truly memorable juxtapositions in literary geography.

On one side of the street sits a connected pair of mystery bookstores, Mitchell’s and Crime Time, which carry more books with murder and death in the title than most people could have imagined. The stores’ specialty is hardcover books by little known authors of the 1930s and ‘40s in beautiful dust jackets. If you’ve been after a copy of David Greene’s “The Vengeance of Monsieur Black Shirt” (and if you have, I’d like to know why), this is the place to go.

Directly opposite Mitchell’s is the Archives Bookshop, devoted exclusively to books on religion. On this particular morning it was more bustling than Mitchell’s (maybe good is triumphing over evil), its numerous browsers working their way through sections named “Spirituality,” “Theology,” “Church History,” “Preaching” and “Pastoral Counseling.” The experience was so overwhelming that when I saw a decal on the door with the words “It’s Your Choice,” I assumed it had religious connotations when, in fact, it was just letting me know which credit cards I could use.

By this time, the Gamble House, perhaps the most stunning Arts and Crafts private home in the country, was open for business. Constructed in 1908 for Procter & Gamble founder David B. Gamble and designed by the celebrated architectural brother team of Greene and Greene, it was never remodeled, and, as a retirement home, never subjected to the wear and tear of little feet. As a result, except for the inevitable modern fire alarms, it looks, down to its specially made furniture, exactly as it did in its heyday. A special treat is a Tiffany lamp fitted with a movable screen to protect readers from the possible bad effects of ultramodern electric lighting.

Hourlong guided tours of the Gamble leave every 20 minutes and are so efficiently run that they pass one another in the house like smoothly running model trains. The Gamble docents are especially knowledgeable about the house: Ours told us that the place took six months to design and, with 36 men working full-time, nine months to build at a cost of $50,500 at a time when well-to-do doctors and lawyers were spending $10,000 at most for a dwelling. We were also severely reminded not to touch anything, even though, as the docent said passionately, “The wood cries out to you, ‘Touch my grain.’ ” It did, but we didn’t.

From the Gamble House it was just a minute or two to the newly renovated Norton Simon, at Orange Grove and Colorado boulevards conveniently across the street from a Ralphs grocery store where, famished, we had a frugal and distinctly non-glamorous lunch at the deli counter before entering the museum.

With its great Rodin bronzes welcoming visitors in the courtyard, the Norton Simon is like a person with a brilliantly successful make-over who’s never looked so good. (The museum had just completed its $5-million renovation in early October.) Under the guidance of architect Frank Gehry, the main-floor galleries, covering European art from the 14th to the 20th centuries, are handsomely redesigned and make excellent use of skylights, and the museum’s rich collection of Asian art is beautifully displayed in the basement.

Best of all is the museum’s new sculpture garden and pond, designed by Nancy Goslee Power around works by Maillol, Moore, Lipchitz and others. Lush, beckoning, both restful and exciting, it has a restorative natural feeling that is wonderful to experience.

The Norton Simon was such a treat, especially its Asian art, that we decided to squeeze in an unplanned visit Sunday morning to the Pacific Asia Museum on Los Robles Avenue, which had the benefit of opening at 10 a.m. It’s in a Chinese palace-style structure built for collector and dealer Grace Nicholson in 1924. Viewing its exquisite collection, including one of the world’s finest groupings of Ming period Swatow pottery, this early in the day meant we were the only visitors, and the quiet central courtyard, complete with koi pond, added to the feeling of tranquillity. A Chinese lunch at Yujean Kang’s in Old Town seemed a natural and tasty segue.

Before we left Pasadena, Patty and I, thinking of trips yet to come, visited a great travel bookstore and supermarket in Old Town called Distant Lands. With a wide selection of books, language tapes (including “Colloquial Bulgarian: A Complete Language Course”) and gadgets (who could live without the Pill-Timer, “the electronic pillbox with a memory and a water supply”), this place could fill your needs no matter where you decide to go.

After only one weekend in Pasadena, what we most wanted to do was return. Good thing it’s so close to home.

Kenneth Turan is The Times’ film critic.

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Budget for Two

Bissell House, two nights: $270.00

Dinner, Shiro: 110.53

Gamble House: 10.00

Lunch, Ralphs: 5.81

Norton Simon Museum: 12.00

Pacific Asia Museum: 10.00

Lunch, Yujean Kang: 22.70

Gasoline: 10.00

FINAL TAB: $451.04

The Bissell House, 201 Columbia St., South Pasadena, CA 91030; tel. (626) 441-3535.