\u00a0<\/p>\n
Together, the two fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures, which made these isolated survivors look almost impossible. They were quickly treated as examples of architecture beating fire, though their survival came down to a far messier combination of design, wind direction and firefighting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, look closely at the houses that survived and certain details begin to repeat. Metal roofs replace shingles, and roof edges become simpler. Concrete or plaster appears where timber siding might once have been, and vegetation pulls away from the facade. For architects working across California<\/strong><\/a>, these choices are becoming part of the house from the first sketch. This means that wildfire is entering the brief as something the building may actually encounter.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n wildfire usually arrives as something very small<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Although the image of a wildfire approaching a house tends to involve a wall of flame, buildings often ignite in a much subtler way. Wind carries burning embers far ahead of the fire front, where they can collect against a wall or slip through a vent and begin burning the house from within. The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety<\/strong><\/a> estimates that embers are responsible for up to 90 percent of home ignitions during wildfires. NIST<\/strong><\/a> similarly identifies embers as the source of the majority of structural losses in wildland-urban fires.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n That changes the scale of the architectural problem. A massive concrete wall can withstand heat, yet a small opening nearby may leave the building vulnerable. Roof geometries suddenly have consequences beyond their appearance. The same goes for the edge where a deck meets the house or the strip of planting immediately outside a window.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n CAL FIRE<\/strong><\/a> now advises homeowners to close gaps at eaves and use ember-resistant vents, among other forms of home hardening. California has also consolidated its wildfire construction requirements into a dedicated Wildland-Urban Interface Code<\/strong><\/a>, which went into effect at the beginning of 2026. The house designed for wildfire starts to look slightly different because its weakest points are being drawn differently.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n a timber house with concrete underneath<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Mork-Ulnes Architects<\/a><\/strong>\u2018 Frame House<\/strong><\/a> in Sonoma makes the idea unusually easy to see. The studio had already built three small concrete guesthouses on the property when the Nuns Fire tore through the area in 2017. The family\u2019s main residence was badly damaged while the concrete structures survived. When the owners returned to Mork-Ulnes for a replacement house, fire resistance was already written into the project by experience.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The new home is organized around an exposed concrete structure with metal-clad windows and noncombustible roofing. Yet the architects resisted turning it into a concrete bunker. Western red cedar panels sit over parts of the shell to give the house the warmth of the timber buildings common across Northern California. Casper Mork-Ulnes describes the cedar as a \u2018sacrificial layer of wood.\u2019 In a fire, that outer skin can be lost while the concrete structure behind it offers another line of defense.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It is a compelling way to think about a house. Some pieces are permanent, while other cosmetic layers are allowed to be vulnerable. Fire resistance here comes from accepting that a building may have to lose part of itself.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n a roof becomes a fire blanket<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Further south in Topanga, 4\/Way House by Deegan-Day Design & Architecture turns the same concern into a much more expressive form. The site sits along Skyhawk Lane in the Santa Monica Mountains, an area hit by the devastating Old Topanga Fire in 1993. Architect Joe Day and Nina Hachigian bought the land later that decade, and over the long process of designing and constructing the house, fire eventually became central to how they understood the site.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A web of steel trusses supports a faceted standing-seam zinc surface that folds across the roof and down parts of the building. Day calls it a \u2018fire blanket.\u2019 Around the house, terraces create outdoor rooms while doubling as buffers between the building and surrounding vegetation. A concrete retaining structure brings another durable layer underneath.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Deegan-Day also considered what would happen beyond the property itself. Because the house sits below other homes on the ridge, its design asked how the site could give firefighters somewhere to work and potentially help protect structures uphill. The wildfire house begins to operate at the scale of the street.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n the california glass house turns inward<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Fire can also change something as basic as where a house chooses to look. At CAMPout<\/strong><\/a>, Faulkner Architects<\/strong><\/a>\u2019 residence near Lake Tahoe, the surrounding pine forest is at once the reason to be there and a source of combustible material.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The architects limit glazing where the house meets the forest and concentrate larger openings around an internal courtyard. Double concrete walls and steel-sash tempered glazing establish a fire-resistant perimeter, and native cedar lines much of the interior. Thus, the interiors are warm and woody, while from the outside, the building meets the landscape with resilient concrete and steel.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n There is an interesting reversal here. California residential architecture spent decades perfecting the idea of dissolving the wall between house and landscape. CAMPout keeps that relationship, but edits where it happens. The widest connection to the forest occurs through the courtyard, where the edge can be controlled.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n rebuilding on the same ground<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Near Healdsburg, just north of San Francisco, Faulkner Architects designed another dwelling: the Pine Flat Residence. had an even more direct encounter with wildfire. The clients\u2019 earlier off-grid house was destroyed by the 2019 Kincade Fire, leaving its concrete foundation behind in the Mayacamas Mountains. The new residence sits within that footprint, incorporating around 90 percent of the existing concrete instead of starting over with a freshly excavated site.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Above it, a long Corten steel shell wraps the house from wall to roof. Sliding screens can cover openings against embers, while sprinklers sit above the exterior decks. Water infrastructure becomes part of the defensive system too, with a dedicated tank supplying the fire hydrant and sprinklers.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Here, wildfire resilience has a physical history beneath it. The old house determines where the next house stands. Concrete that survived one fire becomes part of the architecture built for the next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"learning to live with fire \u00a0 In the days after the Palisades and Eaton fires swept through Los…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":679251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[267],"tags":[95043,46247,365,362,363,364,442,366,18,117,19,17,266839,5794],"class_list":["post-679250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-architecture-in-california","tag-architecture-in-los-angeles","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-climate-change","tag-design","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-modes-of-habitation","tag-residential-architecture-and-interiors"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/679251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"how](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/designing-for-wildfires-houses-habitation-designboom-01.jpg\")
image via @ChasenGreg<\/a><\/p>\n![\"how](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/designing-for-wildfires-houses-habitation-designboom-04.jpg\")
Pine Flat Residence, Faulkner Architects<\/a>, Healdsburg, California, 2025 | image \u00a9Joe Fletcher<\/a><\/p>\n![\"step](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/mork-ulnes-architects-frame-house-designboom-01.jpg\")
Frame House, Mork Ulnes Architects<\/a>, Sonoma, California, 2022 | image \u00a9 Bruce Damonte<\/a><\/p>\n![\"how](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/designing-for-wildfires-houses-habitation-designboom-02.jpg\")
4\/Way House, Deegan-Day Design & Architecture<\/a>, Topanga, California, 2018 | image courtesy the architects<\/p>\n![\"how](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/designing-for-wildfires-houses-habitation-designboom-03.jpg\")
CAMPout, Faulkner Architects, Lake Tahoe, California, 2023 | image \u00a9 Joe Fletcher<\/p>\n