When last week’s fires in Los Angeles set parts of the city ablaze, one viral image was of a lone house in Pacific Palisades that was left standing while all of the homes around it were destroyed.
Architect Greg Chasen said luck was the main factor in the home’s survival, but the brand-new build had some design features that also helped: a vegetation-free zone around the yard fenced off by a solid concrete perimeter wall, a metal roof with a fire-resistant underlayment, class A wood and a front-gabled design without multiple roof lines.
Elsewhere in the Westside Los Angeles neighborhood, another home with a metal roof, cement design and a covered chimney appeared in excellent condition while the homes all around it were all lost. “This house was perfect; it was built for this,” said Jacob Ruano, a federal firefighter with the US Forest Service who was deployed to fight the Palisades fire. “Not all homes are built like that.”
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