LA Fire Rebuild
A Fire Resilient Garden Home for the Alphabet Streets
Pacific Palisades, CA
The narrow, sunlit lots of the Alphabet Streets pose a familiar challenge: how to carve privacy, variety, and respite from a long, 50-foot-wide parcel. Too often, homes on these sites default to the front-and-back yard formula, sacrificing the quality of light and space in the process. We approached the problem differently — seeing not constraints, but a chance to re-imagine what a fire-resilient home could feel like: open, luminous, grounded in nature.
Typical zoning setbacks and the code-mandated two-car garage mean that much of the facade is swallowed up before design even begins. What should be the human face of the home — a place of connection, daylight, and outlook — instead becomes dominated by vehicles and shadows.
To reclaim that front zone for life, we partially submerge the garage, allowing us to recapture the front elevation for windows, views, and natural light. Tucking fuel sources like batteries and gas-powered vehicles below grade also offers a fire-smart advantage — hiding risk beneath a layer of earth.
The heart of the home lies between two distinct but complementary volumes — one dedicated to communal life, housing the kitchen, dining, and living spaces, and the other serving as a private retreat for bedrooms, bathrooms, and personal areas. Linking these wings is a luminous, two-story volume clad in cast channel glass. Glowing softly by day and lantern-like by night, this translucent connector operates as a bridge and threshold space — a moment of quiet transition, refuge, and renewal between the home’s more public and private realms.
Cradled between these volumes is a shaded garden courtyard, an “in-between” space that defies the usual front/back dichotomy. Here, filtered light dances across terracotta, decomposed granite, and plantings, extending the dining and breakfast areas into the outdoors. On its private side, this same garden becomes a serene backdrop for the primary bathroom, lending it a sense of hospitality and quiet luxury. Throughout the home, this inward courtyard floods major rooms with dappled, indirect light, soft and generous in feel.
The primary bedroom suite is located on the ground floor to support aging in place — a quiet shift in planning that allows the home to grow with its occupants. By prioritizing single-level living for the owners, the design blends long-term accessibility with everyday ease, all without compromising architectural character or connection to the garden.
Because fire risk demands a new kind of planting palette, we reserve Zone 0 (closest to the structure) for succulents — green, sculptural, and richly textured, but with high moisture and low oil/resin content. The only trees on site are placed 25 feet away, along the back property line, anchoring the lot’s edge while keeping the structure safe.
Where trees might have once offered shade, we instead deploy a series of perforated metal canopies to cast shifting, leaf-like shadows across walls and paths — evoking the experience of dappled light without the combustible mass.
The entire home is framed in cross-laminated timber (CLT) — a sustainable, precision-engineered system that bolts together on site, forming both the bones and the tactile soul of the interior. The CLT structure is then wrapped in 2 to 4 inches of non-combustible mineral wool insulation (rated to 2000°F) and finished in cement-based cladding, available in a wide palette of tones and textures — a resilient skin over a warm, wooden heart.
This is an all-electric home — designed not only for resilience but for efficiency and comfort. Heating, cooling, and hot water are powered by high-efficiency heat pumps, which deliver up to 3.4 times the energy they consume. Continuous exterior insulation boosts performance across seasons, reducing both energy use and monthly costs. In the kitchen, chef-grade European appliances — including responsive induction cooktops and precision electric ovens — offer clean, efficient cooking without the use of gas. Every system in the house works in concert to reduce operational carbon without compromising livability.
Thanks to its CLT construction, the home sequesters approximately 126 metric tons of carbon. In contrast to conventional building systems that emit carbon during production, CLT locks carbon into the structure itself, making it one of the few building materials that can meaningfully reverse — not just reduce — a home’s environmental footprint.
Underlying this composition is a deep adaptability. The design supports a wide range of roof configurations — from flat to gabled to shed forms with clerestories — and accommodates multiple program sizes: from a 1-bedroom, 1.5-bath starter home to a spacious 4-bedroom, 3.5-bath family residence. In some versions, the “private volume” becomes a detached ADU, creating two distinct dwellings separated by the central garden. This flexibility makes the design viable for multi-generational households, rental income, or phased development — without sacrificing elegance or coherence.
