Can fire-resistant homes be sexy? 'You be the judge,' says this Palisades architect
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At first glance, it looks like nothing more than a charming Spanish-revival, quintessentially Californian home — but this Pacific Palisades rebuild is constructed like a tank.Every exterior wall of the steel-framed home is a foot-thick, fire-resistant barricade.The home is connected to a satellite fire monitoring service.
Should a fire start in town, sturdy metal shutters descend to cover every window.An exterior sprinkler system can pump 40,000 gallons of water from giant tanks hidden behind the shrubs in the property’s yard.
If the cameras and heat sensors around the house detect danger, the system can envelop the home in over 1,000 gallons of fire retardant and hundreds of gallons of fire-suppressing foam.Palisades resident and architect Ardie Tavangarian is so confident in his design that he even asked the fire department if they could start a controlled fire on the property to test it all out.(They said no.)Tavangarian built a career designing multimillion-dollar luxury homes in Los Angeles, but after the Palisades fire destroyed 13 of his works — including his family’s home — he found another calling: how to design a house that can handle what the Santa Monica Mountains throw at it.
And how to do it quickly and affordably.“Nature is so powerful,” he said, sitting on a couch in the new house, which he built for his adult twin daughters.“We are guests living in that environment and expecting, ‘Oh, nature is going to be really kind to me.’ No, it’s not.
It does what it’s supposed to do.”Tavangarian watched the Jan.1 Lachman fire from his property not far from here; a week later that fire rekindled, grew into the Palisades fire, and burned through his house.
But the painful details of the fire — the missteps of the fire department, the empty reservoir — didn’t matter when it came to deciding how to rebuild, he said.The reality is, many fires...