More than 12,000 structures have been consumed by the wildfires raging across Los Angeles this week, many of them single-family homes that have stood for decades.
A brand-new house in Pacific Palisades designed and built by architect Greg Chasen in summer 2024 could have easily been one of them. None of the other homes around it survived, and a car parked out front by a neighbor was the perfect vector to spread the flames.
Yet on Jan. 9, after a night of devastation, Chasen found the house intact, barely touched by the fire. A photo of the house posted by the Malibu architect went viral on X, and a thread on Reddit swelled with guesses about what saved it.
Luck was the biggest factor, Chasen concedes, but it wasn’t providence alone. If it weren’t for several fire-resilient design strategies, the home would have been destroyed.
“This house was a personalized labor of love for a dear friend,” Chasen says. “It meant a lot to turn a corner and see it there.”
Thousands of Angelenos are still at risk, with new evacuations following a week of destruction. In the months and years to come, as Los Angeles recovers, lawmakers will weigh decisions about where and what to rebuild. Some of these discussions will surely tackle how to rebuild as well. Architects who specialize in climate-adaptive design — informed by lessons learned from California to Australia — say that protecting homes from wildfires will require a policy that accounts for design.
Some of the fire-proofing decisions made by Chasen stand out in the picture. The yard is a protected area free of vegetation, fenced off by cast-in-place concrete garden walls, with landscaping in a sparse Mediterranean desert style. The home’s owner has been through fires before, so he was prepared: He removed trash cans and other loose items from around the house and even left the side gates open, knowing that a fire can spread along a fence to a house.
“We were unfortunate that the neighbor parked the car adjacent to the house. There’s molten aluminum in the picture, 1,200 degrees,” Chasen says. “That wall prevented a lot of that heat from getting to the house.”
Other design factors are more subtle. Along the side of the house there are no eaves or overhangs, which can form eddies or trap embers blown by high winds. The house doesn’t have any attic vents to allow sparks to get inside the roof, which is metal, with a fire-resistant underlayment. And the house is simple: front-gabled without multiple roof lines, dormers or other pop-outs, which are vulnerable intersections in a fire.
Still other elements are invisible — yet critical. The walls of the house have a one-hour fire rating. The deck is Class A wood, as resistant to ignition as concrete or steel, Chasen says. Tempered glass protects the interiors. And the front of the house was built with heat-treated wood, shielded from flying sparks and embers by the extruding walls and roof line.
“All of that is best practice for cutting a fire,” he says.
From Passive House to Resistant House
Some of the features in Chasen’s design are typical for new construction in Southern California, while others are aesthetic choices with powerful functional upsides. The simplicity of the house was the first factor that struck Michael Eliason, the founder and principal of Larch Lab, a Seattle architecture studio that focuses on climate-adaptive design. “It’s a super-compact form,” he says. “It’s kind of like the Monopoly house.”
Eliason is the author of Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities, released in December, and a champion of code reforms to permit better buildings. He’s an authority on Passive House, a design practice for building super energy-efficient homes. In his book, Eliason writes that the Passive House approach was influenced by vacuum-insulated water bottles, made to keep both hot liquids hot and cold liquids cold. By building homes in an airtight envelope with highly efficient materials, passive designers can dramatically reduce the energy required to heat or cool a home.
As a climate-minded architect practicing in the Pacific Northwest, Eliason says he never anticipated that he would be designing wildfire smoke-resistant homes. But with wildfires breaking out more frequently in Washington and smoke events regularly lasting three weeks or more, his clients now ask for this advice all the time. “This issue of widespread wildfire smoke was on nobody’s radar, even in the Passive House community,” Eliason says, until the 2018 Camp Fire, at the time the most destructive in California state history.
Passive design features such as windows with triple glazing or vacuum insulation also help with smoke. In fact, many of the Redditors on the thread about Chasen’s Pacific Palisades design guessed that it was a Passive House. That thread featured a lot of mischaracterizations, according to Eliason, with people confusing Passive House for passive solar, an approach that involves heating or cooling a house without mechanical or electrical systems. Another misconception — one that comes up in policy debates as well — is that meeting the Passive House standard is hugely expensive.
“Someone [on Reddit] said Passive House buildings are 30–50% more expensive than typical construction, which is really not true,” Eliason says. “It’s easing down to about 1–5% more on multifamily buildings. It could be a little bit higher on single family. But you can get multifamily buildings that are doing Passive House at cost.”
While the Pacific Palisades house design shares some elements in common with passive strategies, it wasn’t built to Passive House standards. Chasen, a design-build architect who leads his construction projects, says that he’s a fan of Passive House, but that level of energy efficiency isn’t necessary for such a temperate place.
“We live in a benign climate here in Southern California,” Chasen says. “A lot of the measures used in Passive House become overkill.”
Climate-Adaptive Design Isn’t a Style
An isolated home still standing amid so much devastation looks like a miracle; an edgy design left intact looks like an outlier. But Chasen’s house wasn’t the only fire-resistant home to survive — and houses don’t have to be highly contemporary to stand a chance.
The biggest predictor for how buildings fare in a wildfire may simply be their age. Newer homes are required to comply with much higher standards of construction. Some of the homes in Pacific Palisades were 90 years old, with very little fire protection, according to Clive Dawson, an architect who has built homes in Malibu for 40 years.
“If you remodel a house you can make all these changes to it, and it can be very fire-resistant,” Dawson says. “Most people don’t do those sort of things. They’re more interested in a nice new kitchen or a bath.”
A house stands intact as the surrounding hillside is scorched by the Palisades Fire near Saddle Peak, in the Santa Monica Mountains between Malibu and Calabasas, on Jan. 10.Photographer: Agustin Paullier/AFP via Getty Images
The architect says that he’s done hundreds of renovations in Southern California to make houses fire-resistant. Driving along a stretch of beach in Malibu this week, Dawson says that he counted five houses left standing; three were his projects. “I haven’t had any house burn that’s been brought up to the latest standard.”
And while Chasen — who is Dawson’s son-in-law — favors contemporary design, Dawson works in all kinds of styles. His mansions, remodels and fire rebuilds in Malibu range from Spanish Colonial to Georgian to International Style. Meeting or exceeding local building codes will result in something far more resistant than houses built 30 or 40 years ago, like many of those burning in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
Dawson says he’s learned things from past fires that he still applies today. A house that he built in the 1980s was the only one left standing in the neighborhood after the Woolsey Fire in 2018. The orientation and exterior materials, including a metal roof and metal eaves, prevented a fire from sparking inside the roof, which is the way most homes burn down.
“You typically know where the fire is coming from,” Dawson says. “You bear that in mind when you’re designing because that will make a difference.”
The Limits of Climate Design
Designers thinking about climate are up-front about the fact that architecture isn’t going to spare Southern California homes from future fires.
Eliason says that the most important decisions about the recovery will be focused on the wildland-urban interface — the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development — as well as the wildland-urban intermix, where rural housing intermingles with wildland vegetation.
“How those places are redeveloped, if they’re redeveloped, is going to be really, really crucial,” Eliason says.
A lone house in the historic Lahaina area in Maui survived the fires that ravaged that region in August 2023.Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Lawmakers may respond to the fires by changing how homes are built, not just where they’re built. Adjustments to building codes in Los Angeles County and beyond could limit the use of wood in construction or require noncombustible building materials. Stephen Jacob Smith, executive director of the Center for Building in North America, warns that such changes could make housing much more expensive, exacerbating a different crisis in LA. Expensive elements of a building code implemented for a wood-construction paradigm, such as sprinklers and standpipes, are unlikely to go away if wood is restricted.
Past design interventions meant to respond to wildfires have met with mixed results. After the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, in 2009, a group of architects came up with a series of pro bono customizable home designs made to withstand fires. Few of the prototypes were built, especially in the climate-sensitive areas where they were most needed, according to The Guardian, because they were relatively expensive and people preferred traditional homes. Other innovations have made wildfires less costly for Australia than for other Western nations.
Under the current dispensation in California, fire-safety solutions can themselves be problems during a disaster. PVC pipes for sprinklers in homes that aren’t designed to withstand wildfires, for example, will sometimes melt, spewing water uselessly and making things worse, Chasen says. Even for a builder, it’s hard to know what the tradeoffs are for different homes or what an effective answer looks like going forward.
Southern California needs to rebuild more resiliently, at the neighborhood and city scale, without raising already-dramatic construction costs. It will be years before it’s clear whether LA’s efforts are successful. But after a disaster this significant, major changes are almost certain.
“We’re looking at a whole different kind of approach to building. Look at Altadena, these Craftsmen buildings, or in the Palisades, 1920s through 1950s bungalows, Spanish houses — they weren’t designed for this kind of climate and this kind of intense fire,” Chasen says. “It’s going to be a rethink of how we do things.”
