Rebuilding Los Angeles’ Palisades with climate-responsive homes

How can a climate-responsive home function when that climate is extremely hostile?

That’s the challenge facing home designers in California’s Santa Monica Mountains following last year’s Palisades and Eaton fires, which combined to be the most destructive wildfires in the history of Los Angeles County.

The rebuilding process in the months following the fires was “relatively swift” and complemented by “a score of initiatives to help design and construct homes” that could largely withstand future conflagrations, reported Patrick Sisson in AIA Architect last year. Keenly aware of the systemic regulatory hurdles that face home developers in Southern California, some of these initiatives unveiled pre-designed homes, meant to streamline the work of hiring an architect, securing a builder, obtaining a permit, acquiring materials, and insuring the home. 

In that spirit, a rebuilding program called RESET brings together four Los Angeles architecture firms, an engineering firm, a permitting agency, an insurer of record, and a manufacturer of off-site, cold-formed-steel structural framing. Created by Builders Workshop, a general contractor specializing in luxury homes, RESET has the goal of delivering homes that are above code, transparent in price, and compliant with wildland-urban interface requirements.

Resetting the Palisades

Matt McRoskey, Builders Workshop’s head of growth, knew that any rebuilding efforts in the Palisades would be driven by speed, scale, and costs. The missing piece, as he saw it, was quality.

As debris-clearing efforts got underway in the spring of 2025, McRoskey recalls a conversation he had with Geoff Hackett, the company’s CEO, who expressed concern that the Palisades would become “flooded with a thousand or more cheap production homes,” which would be difficult to insure.  

According to Hackett, the program’s chosen architects—a group composed of EYRC Architects, Montalba Architects, RIOS, and Woods + Dangaran—all “knew there was real viability in these homes getting built and being insured. Once we knew we could get them insured, the probability of getting them built went way up.” One RESET partner, Marsh McLennan, is guaranteeing that any of these firms’ ready-to-submit designs will be underwritten by the owner’s insurer of choice.

Designing fire-resistant homes for pre-approval isn’t a novel market strategy. RESET is unique, though, because of its integrated and systems-level approach to producing high-quality homes with a clear path from start to finish, avoiding the delays, surprise expenses, and bureaucratic red tape that affect many new home builds. 

Key to this integrated approach is the presence of Ghost Factory, an Austin, Texas–based manufacturer of cold-formed-steel structural panels and MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) kits, which was also co-founded by Hackett in 2025. Ghost Factory’s value chain comes from what Hackett calls “a deployable micro factory” that’s equipped to deliver precision-engineered parts to a build site, ensuring that a new home can be framed and erected in a fraction of the time it normally takes. 

Ghost Factory currently has one such production facility active in Texas, and its second facility, dubbed GF001, will deploy in Los Angeles in 2027. Hackett’s target is to build about 40 RESET homes in the Palisades within the next few years. 

How the four architecture firms approached RESET

The use of cold-formed steel in the homes is an important part of RESET’s climate resiliency promise, as are each home design’s cementitious skin, spare landscaping, and lack of eaves. On its website, RESET states this program is “inspired by the legacies” of Joseph Eichler, the famed mid-century developer and pioneer of California Modern, and Ingvar Kamprad, the late founder of IKEA. Whatever legacy this program ends up leaving will be informed by the homes themselves, which reflect different visions from the architecture firms behind them.

RIOS’ California cool

The design response from RIOS radiates California cool. The LA-based firm’s RESET home design adopts a playful geometry and a deft balance of light and dark tones that befit the area’s mountainous terrain and comparatively temperate climate. While the 3,470-square-foot, two-story house is designed to accommodate four bedrooms, its scale and volume appear modest from the street front. (The other firms’ designs are three-bedroom homes.)

Sebastian Salvadó, AIA, a partner with RIOS, says their design’s modesty was quite intentional. “This community was decimated, so we knew construction efficiency and local sourcing were important. We also wanted to devise a home that thinks about the larger community.” Salvadó cites how the home’s foundation, which recalls how one might construct the letter Y out of Lego bricks, invites “the interlocking of indoor-outdoor spaces” with adjacent properties. 

Montalba’s repeatable quality

Blurring the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces was a signature feature of most Eichler homes, and that comes to bear in Montalba’s 3,700-square-foot RESET home (aka the “wrap-around house,” the largest of the four). Its floor plan features lower ceilings, inward-facing courtyard, and floor-to-ceiling windows. However, founding principal David Montalba says their focus wasn’t on “replicating that [Eichler] model.” He adds: “RESET allowed us to reinterpret those principles through a contemporary lens and an efficiency model … with greater emphasis on fire resilience, material performance, and climate response.” 

That contemporary response to RESET’s mandate of delivering quality and resilience at a fixed cost is telling. In the context of this rebuilding effort, it demands that multiple stakeholders who are often disparate players—such as architects, builders, and manufacturers—work within a holistic and predictable framework. According to Montalba, “the challenge is to ensure that repeatability creates efficiencies without compromising quality.”

Woods + Dangaran’s streamlined flat

Speaking of efficiency, the ready-to-submit design from Woods + Dangaran, a three-bedroom, four-bathroom two-story home, is arguably the most streamlined of the RESET group, resembling a modernist take on a railroad flat. It’s also the sole design to feature a front-facing porch/courtyard and a covered carport instead of an enclosed garage.

The rectangular footprint and large side yard setback are both good fire resiliency measures. They also intentionally give “separation from adjacent structures,” says Joseph Dangaran, the firm’s founding partner. Still, reinforcing what he calls the “supportive fabric” of the community was always front of mind. “It was critical that our design promote and provide a space for families to interact and heal together.”

The Courtyard House from Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney

While Woods + Dangaran’s home demands a narrow and deep lot, Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney (EYRC)’s Courtyard House seeks the exact opposite. Melding California Modern aesthetics with boxy luxury, the two-story, 3,560-square-foot house casts a wide band and is also marked by generous setbacks along the front and side yards. 

Interestingly, EYRC principal Steve Dodge says his firm’s design shares kinship with the work of Charles and Ray Eames, specifically their famed 1949 Eames House, located in the Palisades. “The simplicity and clarity of the Eames House is both endearing and enduring,” Dodge says. “The lasting impact shows how modern construction technologies can be used to deliver high quality when combined with thoughtful design.” And while Dodge concedes that “no home can be completely fireproof,” RESET and similar programs reveal both an earnest desire to build something lasting and a humbling acceptance of future risk.

Gaining clarity

Even as rebuilding continues in the Palisades, so does the grieving process. McRoskey, of Builders Workshop, attributes that to people just beginning to understand exactly what they lost. “We’re approaching the two-year anniversary [of the fire], and I have dozens of close friends and family that still don’t have clarity on what their budget is from insurance,” he says. Further uncertainty comes from permitting, inspections, and other steps that need to happen before a home is built. 

“That’s why we put this program together,” he says. “We wanted all those questions answered. All the long lead times, the stressful conversations with the city … we wanted this stuff done ahead of time because we truly wanted to be the easy button for folks that wanted to rebuild.”

Justin R. Wolf is a freelance writer covering architecture and design. He lives in Maine.