On Thursday, January 9, as fires spread across the Los Angeles area, architect Greg Chasen woke up early after a fitful night’s sleep. He’d been at his parents’ house in Pacific Palisades the night before, desperately trying to protect it by trimming back shrubs, turning on sprinklers, and turning off the gas and power, as the wind howled and flames rose in the distance.
After spending the night at his own house, he went back. “I woke up at dawn thinking there’s no way you could do anything against fire like that,” he says. “I crossed my fingers and thought, I’ll get on my bike and go see how it went.”
Fortunately, the canyon where his parents live had narrowly escaped the fire. So he rode his bike farther to look at a house he’d designed for a friend that had finished construction only months earlier. The neighborhood was devastated. On one side of the street, around 60 houses in a row had burned. But the newly built house was still standing.
In part, it was luck. But the property had also been designed with a few extra steps that made it less likely to burn—and could be an example for others when rebuilding begins in the burn zone.
First, the landscaping was designed to be as fire-resilient as possible. The yard, which is surrounded by concrete walls, is filled with gravel and low plants, rather than larger trees that could easily spread flames to a home if they catch on fire. (The owner, who had lived through another wildfire elsewhere in the past, also went through the yard removing any dead leaves before the fire spread to the area.)
The walls of the house are made with fire-rated materials, in addition to low-flame-spread materials. “In the code, you have a choice of one or the other,” Chasen says. “In this case, we had both.”
The deck is made with concrete and Class A wood, which Chasen says resists fire. The windows use tempered glass that can survive high heat and impact from flying debris. When the next-door neighbor’s car exploded into flames in the adjacent driveway, an outer pane of glass in the new house broke, but the interior tempered glass stayed in place. The roof is metal, with a fire-resistant layer underneath, and doesn’t have any vents that could let in embers. The house was tightly sealed, and after the fire, only had a slight smoky smell.
The building code in California has changed after past fires; Los Angeles was the first large city in the country to ban wood shingle roofs, in 1989. (After a destructive fire in Oakland in 1991, lawmakers eventually required fire-resistant roofing materials statewide.) It’s possible that the building code could become stricter now. On the same street as the house that survived, some other recently built homes had prefabricated roof trusses that Chasen suspects made them more likely to burn.
“It’s a very cost-effective, quick way to provide all of the roof gables that people like at big new expensive homes, but it’s very vulnerable to fire,” he says. He argues that the building code should address that.
California is also currently drafting laws that would require more “defensible space,” with vegetation farther away from homes. Requiring more space between structures could also help reduce the risk of a fire spreading, though it would mean that fewer houses could be built in neighborhoods where housing is already in short supply.
It’s increasingly common for California architects to focus on fire resistance. “Even for houses that I have that are not in the high fire [risk] zone, we basically take the high fire [risk] zone standards and apply them to all our structures,” says Ignacio Rodriguez, CEO of IR Architects. Of nine recently built houses in the fire zone that his firm designed, eight survived. (The ninth, built on the ocean side of Pacific Coast Highway, had Cape Cod-style wood siding, something that Rodriguez says he no longer uses.)
His strategies include clearing brush from yards beyond Cal Fire’s standards for defensible space, using fire-resistant materials like stucco or fiber-cement siding backed with fire-resistant wallboard and wool or ceramic fiber insulation, and adding roll-down shutters that can help keep flames out of a house. While it’s easiest to build a fire-resistant house from scratch, the same strategies can be used to retrofit older homes to make them safer.
It’s not possible to completely eliminate fire risk in an area where fires naturally burn—especially as climate change increases the chance of more extreme fires. Homeowners also can’t control whether their neighbors trim back vegetation or take other steps to reduce risk for a neighborhood. But targeted changes can make a difference. One insurance startup in California is willing to insure homes in high-fire-risk zones if homeowners make specific improvements, such as removing a tree in a risky location or replacing windows on a vulnerable wall.
Designing for wildfire resilience does add some cost. Of course, it’s arguably worth it. Chasen says that while visiting the devastated neighborhood, he was essentially “looking at a pile of ashes,” adding, “These were $6 million homes. Build smaller, better, more resilient.”
