There is a house along the Arroyo Seco you could walk past and never see. Low stucco walls, few windows, the color of the hillside it sits against — a modernist house built in 1979 by Buff & Hensman, a piece of the Southwest set down in the middle of Pasadena and nestled in the trees. "All I wanted," Carol Soucek King has said, "was a one-room cabin in the middle of the woods in the middle of the city."

The wish to keep this place is older than any of us. In the 1880s, James Scoville laid stone walls along the Arroyo Seco and dreamed of preserving the whole canyon as a park; he died before it was done, but his walls still stand, and a barn once sat on this very land. A century later, Carol Soucek King commissioned Buff & Hensman to answer that same landscape — one of the last works of a partnership that helped define Southern California modernism. She has kept it as a sanctuary ever since; the Arroyo del Rey Foundation exists so that it stays one forever.