BETA26 Residence — Eaton Fire Rebuild

BETA26 is a rebuild. Our clients lost their Altadena home in the January 2025 Eaton Fire, and like so many of their neighbors they've spent the time since deciding not just whether to return, but how. Their answer — and ours — is that a rebuild shouldn't be a replica or a placeholder. It should be an argument for what comes next: a home rooted in its site, not placed on top of it, and a piece of a neighborhood knitting itself back together.

The site is a through-lot of roughly 15,000 square feet, and it remembers more than the fire. These were once rancho lands — Altadena sits on the old Rancho San Pasqual grant — and the old-growth oaks anchoring the parcel likely began as living boundary markers, demarcating ownership across the early lands of the region. The house that stood here before January 2025 was an early-twentieth-century Altadena Craftsman: arroyo rock–clad columns rising from the ground, an exuberant palette balanced across window frames and wood cladding. We aren't rebuilding that house. We're listening to it and its history.

That listening shapes the brief: the most important design decisions on this project will happen at the threshold between the built and the grown — where Liberty's practice as a garden designer meets Mark's photographer's eye for light and volume. Five ambitions carry equal weight on the boards, twenty percent each: dumb geometry — primitive, archetypal forms made memorable through honest, unfussy materials; warm craft and moody vibes — carved wood, earthen textures, the visible mark of the hand; momentary exuberance in small, intentional doses; something quintessentially Californian; and a landscape treated as essential, never secondary.

The echoes are deliberate — the doses of exuberance carry the Craftsman's confident color forward in a new voice. Taken together, the five ambitions are really one: to make a Craftsman sensibility contemporary for a new generation — the honesty of material, the visible hand, the house-and-garden inseparability that defined this region's first great domestic architecture, reargued in today's terms rather than reenacted.

We're now leaning into the 50% mark of Design Development, developing strategic personalities for how the home's form and spatial experiences carry the ambitions of the project's brief. Across the variations in color and massing you see in these views, textures combine harmoniously to exemplify craft and the hand; a masonry base grounds the lower volumes of our clients' primary home — a wink at the arroyo stones of the house that stood here before; and the integration of local flora into the landscape becomes the final piece in solving their future home. Physical-model renders let us test each move against the trees that started it all.

More as the design develops.