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.
Water tanks form part of a backup water supply in a newly built fire-resistant home in Pacific Palisades.
“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 have burned in these mountains. Many more will.
A sprinkler on the roof is part of a house-wide sprinkler system.
For the architect, who has spent much of his 45-year career designing for luxury, hardening a home against wildfire has brought a new kind of luxury to his homes: peace of mind.
It’s a sentiment that resonates with fire survivors: Tavangarian says he’s received considerable interest from other property owners in the Palisades looking to rebuild their houses.
The metal shutters and advanced outdoor sprinkler system are the flashiest parts of Tavangarian’s home hardening project, and the efficacy of these adaptations is still up for debate. Because the measures have not yet been widely adopted, there are few studies exploring how much or little they protect homes in real-world fires.
Architect Ardie Tavangarian inside the house he designed.
Anecdotal evidence has indicated the effectiveness of sprinklers can vary significantly based on the setup and the conditions during the fire. Extreme wind, for example, can make them less effective. Lab studies have generally found shutters can reduce the risk of windows shattering.
These measures aren’t cheap, either. Sprinkler systems can cost north of $100,000, for example. However, Tavangarian said when all was said and done, the home he built for his daughters cost around $700 per square foot — less than what Palisades residents said they expected to pay, but more than what Altadena residents expected for their rebuilds.
Tavangarian also hopes to see insurers increasingly consider the home-hardening measures property owners take when writing policies, which he said could potentially offset the extra cost in a decade or less. As he explored getting insurance for the new home, one insurer quoted him $80,000 a year. After he convinced the company to visit the property, it lowered the quote to just $13,000, he said.
The house includes metal heat shields that can drop down if a fire approaches.
The home also has essentially all of the other less flashy — but much cheaper and well-proven — home hardening measures recommended by fire professionals: The underside of the roof’s overhang is closed off — a common place embers enter a home. The roof, where burning embers can accumulate, is made of fire-resistant material. The windows, vulnerable to shattering in extreme heat, are made of a toughened glass. There is virtually no vegetation within the first five feet of the home.
When asked if he felt he had compromised on design, comfort or aesthetics for the extra protection — one of the many concerns Californians have with the state’s draft “Zone Zero” requirements that may significantly limit vegetation within five feet of a home — Tavangarian simply said, “You be the judge.”
