“I’m living the research right now,” adds the architect, who with his wife lost their Agoura Hills home to the Woolsey Fire.
#HOW TO USE RNG REPORTER WITH FIRE RED FULL#
“Communities at the base of the mountains get the full brunt of the material and velocity” of floods, he explains. “It’s really uncharted territory,” says Kochanowski, who with his team devised a system of micro-basins placed throughout slope environments, instead of one large trough at the bottom of mountain terrain. The architect at Rios Clementi Hale Studios (behind Imagine Entertainment’s Beverly Hills offices and Barry Diller’s West Hollywood IAC headquarters) works on the Slide Project, which analyzes mudslides during floods. What happens after a fire is just as important to Greg Kochanowski. “Concrete can heat up that it becomes structurally compromised.”) “A hot steel beam can twist,” warns Hertz. (Note: Not all sturdy-sounding materials perform well in extreme heat. “It’s access to wooded views that puts these Bel Air, Pacific Palisades and Malibu homes in harm’s way - extremely desirable, but not from a fire perspective,” he says. Interior designer Vanessa Alexander, who is married to ICM partner Steve Alexander and has worked with filmmaker Marc Webb, thinks that Los Angeles residence design is changing as the frequency of natural calamities increases: “We aren’t going to be designing based on pure aesthetics anymore - but that doesn’t mean everything has to be a cinder block.” Alexander, who created the look of Malibu Farm restaurant, adds: “You can still get your Cape Cod home, but it might be completely reimagined from a materials perspective,” with metal or concrete siding in place of the traditional wood siding used in Cape Cod and Craftsman residences.Īrchitect William Hefner, who has designed for Ed Begley Jr., uses stone cladding and metal roofs on Montecito and Malibu homes to retain a stately, estate feel, and artfully integrates emergency water tanks into the landscape. We were in the line of the fire and it survived.” Sweis designed a concrete house in Ojai with “Class A fire-rated wood and heavy timber, which takes longer to burn. “You can build a very safe home and then put a trellis with a bougainvillea next to the house” that can essentially act as a wick, says architect Abeer Sweis, whose clients have included now-deceased executive Michael King. Wood decking, eaves, trellises and pergolas are big risks because horizontal surfaces become convenient resting places for embers.
#HOW TO USE RNG REPORTER WITH FIRE RED WINDOWS#
Extraordinarily, the studio had 100 percent no damage.” For the second-time-around rebuild on the main house, Buckner will do “a very large concrete patio next to it and movable fire shutters” - metal barriers that are manually put in place to block fire entry and to prevent glass windows from exploding. “Something got into the gutter of the main house and saw it go up in flames,” she says of the residence that had been fireproofed after the Green Meadows Fire in 1993: “I thought it would make it. Buckner - who built two structures on her Yerba Buena Canyon property, a main house with less-flammable stucco and sprinklers and a 700-square-foot studio with metal siding, double-glazed glass and fire screens - experienced one burning while the other survived. Hertz is part of a pioneering group of architects and designers exploring new ways to protect properties from Southern California’s ever more frequent fires and floods, a club that also includes Cory Buckner, architect to Courteney Cox, Tomb Raider producer Patrick McCormick and top costume designer Colleen Atwood.