Half an 1895 Victorian-era home from Lincoln Heights is moved onto a lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Michael Janz and his wife Brooke Lohman-Janz, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
In its multistoried life, this old house’s latest chapter is its most dramatic yet.
On Friday, a 131-year-old Victorian home arrived in two blocky pieces to Altadena, its second story disassembled and stuffed into its first floor. Days before, bricks, wooden posts and other smaller, original elements were trucked into its new space.
The 1895 home’s welcoming committee: new owners Brooke Lohman-Janz and Michael Janz, and banker-turned-preservationist Brad Chambers, who worked with DECRO, a Culver-City based affordable housing nonprofit that donated the structure.
“It’s a high-five moment,” said Chambers, who is helping several Altadena families pro bono navigate the complexities of relocating historic homes and offering his best practices and resources for rebuilding. “It’s an incredible feeling. It’s touchdown.”
Brooke Lohman-Janz, center, and her husband Michael Janz, with their dog Izzy watch an 1895 Victorian-era home being craned onto their lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026 with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers, left, and Jerry Sprague, right, who graded their property. The couple lost their rented home during the Eaton fire and Chambers is helping them preserve the historical home from Lincoln Heights. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
An 1895 Victorian-era home from Lincoln Heights is moved to Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Michael Janz and his wife Brooke Lohman-Janz, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Anna Schlobohm de Cruder documents a historical home being moved into her neighborhood in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Schlobohm de Cruder received two 800 square foot historical Craftsman homes to replace her home she lost in the Eaton fire the day before. Preservationist-developer Brad Chambers has helped to move five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Brooke Lohman-Janz watches an 1895 Victorian-era home being craned onto her lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Brooke and her husband Michael, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Brooke Lohman-Janz shows a photo of the 1895 Victorian-era home before it was cut and moved to her lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Brooke and her husband Michael, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Brooke Lohman-Janz, right, watches an 1895 Victorian-era home being craned onto her lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026 with her mother Pam Lohman and sister Valerie Lohman. Brooke and her husband Michael, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Michael Janz and his dog Izzy watch an 1895 Victorian-era home being craned onto his lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Michael and his wife Brooke, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
An 1895 Victorian-era home from Lincoln Heights is moved onto a lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Michael Janz and his wife Brooke Lohman-Janz, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
An 1895 Victorian-era home from Lincoln Heights is moved onto a lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026. Michael Janz and his wife Brooke Lohman-Janz, who lost their rental home in the Eaton fire, purchased a lot and are working with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers who has moved five historical homes to Altadena. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
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Brooke Lohman-Janz, center, and her husband Michael Janz, with their dog Izzy watch an 1895 Victorian-era home being craned onto their lot in Altadena on Friday, April 10, 2026 with preservationist-developer Brad Chambers, left, and Jerry Sprague, right, who graded their property. The couple lost their rented home during the Eaton fire and Chambers is helping them preserve the historical home from Lincoln Heights. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
For Lohman-Janz, an opera singer, and her husband, a musician who also works for a nonprofit, the day encompassed a scale of feeling founded on the Eaton fire of January 2025, when the couple lost everything but their determination to stay in the town that from the beginning was “just our vibe.”
They got the wheels turning on their house-moving plans weeks after the fire, counting themselves lucky to find a lot they could afford to buy in the town they had rented in for seven years.
“I feel we are some of the most lucky of the unlucky,” Lohman-Janz said. “We did lose everything and it’s been traumatic, but now we have all this to look forward to.”
Besides, she adds, she’s never been one to do conventional things.
Neither is Chambers, who worked with DECRO Corporation in Culver City to find Altadenans their new homes. DECRO is an affordable housing developer that donated the homes from the site of a Lincoln Heights development. The century-old structures were preserved and set aside during building of a 97-unit affordable and permanent supportive housing development in 2024.
Ted Handel, CEO of DECRO, said matching the historic homes to Altadena families furthers the corporation’s mission of changing lives through community development.
“By donating these homes, our nonprofit opened a new door to furthering its mission and supporting these families in rebuilding their lives,” Handel said, adding it’s a boon to help contribute to the restoration of the Altadena community.
Chambers said in the nearly 25 years he has been moving and restoring historic homes, there was a a steady supply of old homes set for demolition in the L.A. area. The challenge had mostly been finding land for it, but the Eaton and Palisades fires, which destroyed more than 16,000 structures over 38,000 acres, presented preservationists with suddenly available space.
To date, Chambers and his building team have moved and reassembled six homes in Altadena, including two homes in one lot belonging to Anna Schlobohm de Cruder. Her home and the Janz’s are within view of the other, and will, their owners happily report, be neighbors.
Schlobohm de Cruder, a dementia doula and former designer for Hollywood productions, is hitting the rebuilding ground running.
“I understand and speak ‘old house,’” she said. “The house that burned was built in 1923 and was in rough shape when I bought it. It required a lot of restoration, so the process is one I know and feel comfortable with. I also love that moving these homes brings architectural character, craftsmanship, and history back to Altadena.”
Another couple, Jacques Laramee and Gwen Sukeena, are proud owners of a 1910 Craftsman relocated to Altadena in August. Sukeena was a featured designer in last year’s Pasadena Showcase House of Design.
Chambers, of Hollywood Hills, is a self-described historic purist who hopes the people he is helping now will pay it forward and encourage other fire survivors to explore the house relocation path. He himself sparked a passion as a child, loving fort building and house design. His career as a Bank of America executive did little to diminish his interest in saving19th-century homes.
The work is about stories and families, those before and those yet to come,
“I want them help them pull it off,” Chambers said of the Altadenans, “Anyone who has a passion to live in an old house, who can imagine all that history and then build on it.”
The Janz’s Victorian home began life in 1895, its first owners most likely Italians, since St. Mary’s Catholic Church was built just eight years before, the center of an Italian neighborhood. From there, there’s much mystery: perhaps worlds of Sunday dinners, and holidays, cycles of births and weddings and deaths.
For the Janzes, married 13 years, the home, which is still in its planning stages, holds no heavy connection to the wildfire. Visiting the razed clear lot where their duplex once stood, less than two miles away, “I feel more of an emptiness there,” Lohman-Janz said.
Their 3,600-square-foot lot will include about 1,400 square feet of total living space, enough for four bedrooms and hopefully two baths. And while they will eventually install new pipes, electrical, and insulation, as well as sprinklers and other fire-proofing elements, the couple will stay as historically accurate as they can.
They will restore pocket doors that were removed inside the home, and with help from Chambers and consultant Alan Pinel, will remodel and redesign the home to code, including switching a stairway and widening the upstairs hallway.
What remains will still be old and beautiful: the wide-plank fir floors, Greek Revival architectural details and newly-rediscovered transom windows over doors that had been covered up during a 1940s remodel. The couple are also keeping much of what survived the fire, including a Gothic pillared gate and trellis, and a bounty of hedges and plants.
“It’s lovely to see everyone so excited and rooting for us, and for Altadena too. It’s one more piece of the puzzle of getting Altadenans back to Altadena,” Lohman-Janz said.
Their most optimistic move-in date of September: “I’d love to throw a Halloween party here,” she said. And a fenced yard for their three cats and Izzy, their 9-month-old German Shepherd Husky mix, would be nice too.
That would be the best punctuation to months after they evacuated their home on Jan. 7, 2025. The couple first stayed with Lohman-Janz’s mother in Corona, then rented an apartment in Pasadena for six months before buying their lot, and living on it in a 1963 Streamline Duchess trailer.
“We had nothing to lose,” Michael said.
Chambers said the six historic homes he is helping settle into Altadena will be beacons of what’s possible. He offers his expertise for free to help survivors manage the financial factor of rebuilding, never mind the emotional and practical pressures it brings.
“This will become the pride of the community, once people see the beauty of these homes,” he said.
Maryam Hosseinzadeh of Glassell Park said she is happy to see a special house land in her hometown.
“It’s original pre-fab with old lumber, this house has been hit with everything already, it’s such an Altadena thing to move house,” Hosseinzadeh said, “Brooke is a community inspirer,” helping rally residents and businesses around Two Dragon Martial Arts Studio on Lake Avenue, and championing land trusts and banking initiatives to “keep Altadena land in Altadena hands.”
Lohman-Janz also founded the Altadena Dining Club to help locals patronize Altadena businesses.
Their advice to others hoping to go their route: be flexible.
“Our house needed to be saved,” said Lohman-Janz, who gravitated toward Spanish-style or Tudor homes first. “You find what you love about it to save it and protect it. I’m really happy we went this way. I feel better things are coming,”