Can fire resistant houses be attractive? ‘You be the judge,’ said the Palisades architect

At first glance, it looks like nothing more than a charming Spanish revival, quintessentially Californian home — but this Pacific Palisades remodel is built like a tank.

Every exterior wall of a steel frame house is thick, fireproof. The home is connected to a satellite fire monitoring service. In the event of a fire in the city, strong metal shutters come down to cover all the windows. An outdoor sprinkler system can pump 40,000 liters of water into large tanks hidden behind shrubs in the property’s backyard. If the cameras and heat sensors in the house are in danger, the system can cover the home with more than 1,000 liters of fire retardant and hundreds of liters of fire extinguishing foam.

Palisades resident and architect Ardie Tavangarian is so confident in his design that he even asked the fire department if they could put out a controlled fire on the property to check it 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 projects — including his family home — he found another calling: designing a house that could handle what the Santa Monica Mountains threw at it. And how to do it quickly and affordably.

“Nature is very powerful,” he said while sitting on the sofa in the new house, which he built for his twin older daughters. “We are tourists living in that place and we expect, ‘Oh, nature will be really kind to me.’ No, it’s not. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do.”

Tavangarian watched the fire of Jan. 1 Lachman comes from his place not far from here; after a week that fire woke up, grew into the Palisades fire, and burned his house. But the painful details of the fire — the fire department’s mishandling, the water reservoir — don’t matter when it comes to deciding how to rebuild, he said. The truth is, many fires have burned in these mountains. There are many who will.

A roof sprinkler is part of a whole house sprinkler system.

For the architect, who has spent most of his 45-year career designing for comfort, fire-proofing the home has brought a new kind of comfort to his homes: peace of mind.

It’s a sentiment that resonates with fire survivors: Tavangarian says he’s gotten a lot of interest from other Palisades property owners who want to rebuild their homes.

Steel shutters and an upgraded outdoor sprinkler system are the most prominent parts of Tavangarian’s home improvement project, and the effectiveness of these features is still up for debate. Because the measures are not yet widely accepted, there are few studies that examine how much or how little they protect homes from real fires.

Architect Ardie Tavangarian inside the house he is designing.

Anecdotal evidence has shown the effectiveness of sprinklers can vary greatly based on setup and conditions during a fire. Strong winds, for example, can make them ineffective. Lab studies have generally found that shutters can reduce the risk of window breakage.

These steps don’t come 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 about $700 a square foot — less than what Palisades residents said they expected to pay, but more than what Altadena residents expected for their remodel.

Tavangarian also hopes to see insurers consider homeownership measures when writing policies, which he said could cut additional costs in a decade or less. As he was looking into getting new home insurance, one insurer quoted him $80,000 a year. After he convinced them to see the place for themselves, they dropped it to just $13,000, he said.

The house includes metal heat shields that can be lowered when a fire approaches.

The home also has in fact all the other things that are less bright – but very cheap and well proven – ways to strengthen the home recommended by fire experts: The lower part of the roof of the house is closed – a common place for coal to enter the home. The roof, where burning coals can accumulate, is made of non-combustible materials. The windows, which are prone to shattering in extreme heat, are made of toughened glass. There are almost no vegetation within the first five meters of the home.

When asked if he felt he compromised on design, comfort or beauty for added security — one of the many concerns Californians have about the state’s “Zone Zero” requirements that would drastically reduce vegetation within five feet of a home — Tavangarian simply said, “You be the judge.”