BETA26 Residence — Toward Construction

The threshold between the built and the grown is drawn now. Documents are closing in on completion, the palette is being reviewed with both samples and renders, and BETA26 is turning from a set of ambitions into a set of instructions — a house ready to break ground into the new year.

When we last shared BETA26, it was leaning into the 50% mark of Design Development. Since then the project has done the quiet, consequential work that turns a design into a building. We are now moving through the completion of our construction documents, and we are aiming to begin construction into the new year. The home our clients lost in the January 2025 Eaton Fire is no longer only a proposition. We’ve imagined it in every detail.

The brief has not moved. BETA26 is still a rebuild rooted in its site, not placed on top of it, and the most important decisions still happen at the threshold between the built and the grown — where our client Liberty’s practice as a garden designer meets our client Mark’s photographer’s eye for light and volume. What has changed is resolution. The five ambitions that each carried twenty percent of the project — dumb geometry, warm craft and moody vibes, momentary exuberance, something quintessentially Californian, and a landscape treated as essential — have hardened from intentions into material. They are no longer things we hope the house will feel like. They are things you can now point to.

You can see it in the palette these views finally lock. Carved wood ceilings and warm-toned millwork carry the craft and the visible hand. A masonry base grounds the lower volumes in one of the houses — still a wink at the arroyo stones of the Craftsman that stood here before. Terrazzo holds the lower-level floors and the wet rooms.

And the exuberance arrives in its promised small but occasionally roaring, intentional doses: a coral-steel window package and railing details through the section, a single round porthole framing the garden, a freestanding hearth, ochre and terracotta surfacing where the light can find them.

The echoes of the old house are deliberate across the two structures — the Craftsman’s confident color married with a modernist sensibility of space, both carried forward in a new voice, reargued in today’s terms rather than reenacted.

The great room at full resolution — the yellow island carrying the exuberance, the slatted timber ceiling binding the volumes, the green sofa and the painting above answering each other across the floor.

Even the smaller rooms carry the project’s thesis. The exuberance is not loud; it is placed. A single checker-tile wall. A terracotta basin. A coral window frame catching the afternoon through a narrow slot.

The landscape is no longer waiting for the architecture to finish. Drought-tolerant and native planting — agave, buckwheat, sage, the silvered desert species that belong to this ground — press right up to the programmed exterior spaces, so that the garden and the rooms read as one continuous idea.

The old-growth oaks that anchor the through-lot, the living boundary markers that predate the fire and very likely the old rancho lines themselves, remain the trees that started it all.

More as the design meets the ground.