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After being displaced from her Altadena home, designer Justina Blakeney took time to reflect before she could restore. This is her story, as told to Leonora Epstein.
The evening of January 7, 2025 almost felt almost romantic at first. Outside, the wind was doing that full-throated howl that rolls down the hills of Altadena during the Santa Anas. Inside, with the electricity out—not uncommon up here on a windy day—my husband, kiddo, and I posted up in the living room surrounded by all the candles I could find. We played music—me on the guitar, my husband on ukulele—under the beams of our 1930s Spanish home.
My husband left to pick up some pizzas, and that’s when the destabilization began: a patchy phone call from him, halfway down the hill: “Look outside,” he said through the crackle. “The hill is on fire.”
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My brain went into a weird, rule-based mode, like I was following instructions from a disaster movie: Don’t take what can be replaced. So I grabbed passports and important documents and stuffed them into a tote. I went into my closet and started choosing jewelry like I was curating a museum exhibit with seconds to spare. I pulled out the earrings I wore on my wedding day, pearl drops held in little golden cages, a gift from my grandmother.
Demonstrate faith. Don’t take everything. Trust you’ll be okay. Trust the house will be okay.
But another voice in me, sharper and more profane, shouted back: Don’t be an idiot. Take your shit.
There was a push-and-pull during those wild 20 minutes as I moved through the dark with a phone flashlight, ripping my paintings off the walls, gathering my wedding dress and boxes of photos. I blew out all the candles. Everything suddenly smelled like smoke.
I was finishing piling everything into my car—the stuff, my kid, my two cats—when my husband pulled up and immediately started hosing down our giant Italian pine tree out front, the one that umbrellas the whole roof like a protective giant—or a potential torch.
I told him, “Okay, babe, let’s go.” And he said, “I’m not going.” He was resolute on staying, to do everything he could to protect the house.
As I pulled down the hill, I looked back and saw him. In that moment, it stopped being about the house. It stopped being about any object I’d grabbed. My mind narrowed into one single, bright plea: Please, God, protect him.
He made it back to us, his skin smelling of fire.
At dawn, the sky over Pasadena was orange, and that was the first time I understood, in my bones, that this wasn’t a small incident. Still, I didn’t fully believe our house could be gone. I don’t know if it was denial or a kind of knowing, but the possibility felt abstract.
In the morning we drove back up before the barricades went up. As we climbed, houses were still burning. I began to picture what we might meet—would it just be a single chimney standing?
I held my breath as we passed each house. One intact. One burned. One intact. Then suddenly: ours. Still there. I exhaled so hard it felt like my body remembered how to be human again, and tears just started running down my face.
Even then, the magnitude didn’t land. I texted a group about a gathering I was supposed to host in a few days: We’re safe, let’s just reschedule for next week. And for a moment, that seemed almost plausible—it was over, right?
But it was far from “over.” It became a new, long chapter filled with paperwork, hours of hold muzak on the line to insurance companies, testing, testing, more tests.
Of course, one of the heaviest complications was being so lucky when so many others around us had lost their memories, their universes, their lives, even. It’s a type of gratitude mixed with dread: We’re okay…but are we okay? Can we still live here?
The hardest part wasn’t about how close we came to losing all our things—and I do love things. The deeper loss: the sense that home is safe.
It took eight months to get back in. A period of cleaning, cleaning, more cleaning. Replacing the HVAC system, throwing out every upholstered piece of furniture, bed linens, rugs, clothes—anything porous. We filled up three 20-foot-long trucks of stuff to trash. The scale of it was absurd and nauseating.
Even now, back home, the aftermath lives in my body. I don’t walk barefoot outside anymore. A gust of wind dropping debris makes me flinch. We don’t eat the fruit from our fruit trees. Vintage shopping, once my favorite thing, now makes me anxious because I can’t stop thinking that someone’s “perfectly good” sofa, hauled from a burned home, could turn up somewhere for sale like a cursed bargain.
Somewhere inside all of this, there’s the other story I can’t ignore: a creative project pushing my career in a new direction. An oracle deck and guidebook called Grow that I wrote with my mother, Dr. Ronnie Blakeney, who is a Harvard-trained psychologist. The idea came out of a meditative practice I’d started before the fires: What if you had one focus each day, one concentration? Beauty. Honesty. Integrity. I painted each card in the deck—and thank God I still had my studio in Frogtown, a place to keep working.
And here’s the strangest piece of timing: Our publisher slated Grow’s release for January 6. Almost one year to date after the hill set on fire.
That evening, we threw a celebration in our home to fête our achievements, opening our doors to friends, neighbors, and even strangers. People came in—slightly quiet at first, acknowledging the heaviness of the past 364 days. But then a magic happened—music playing, singing, plates being passed around. All the colors on my walls (and they are indeed colorful—a jumble of pinks, greens, oranges, reds), finally felt like they came back into Technicolor.
An accidental anniversary, but one that felt charged.
I felt a new focus: It was never the stuff. It was never the house.
It was the people. It was the life inside of it.
Want to Help? AD is proud to partner with The Foothill Catalog Foundation and San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity to help rebuild homes in Altadena. Click here to donate.
