After the original Sonoma County residence sustained damage from the 2017 Nuns fire, the project team was challenged to design a new four-bedroom house to confront the “new normal” of climate-change fueled wildfires in California. A key driver of this project was to create an attractive fire-resistant four-bedroom home on a high-risk site that wouldn’t resemble an all-concrete bunker.
Concrete was used extensively for structure’s beams, columns, elevated post-tensioned slab and shear walls. A large-scale mockup of a concrete frame section was built on site to test concrete mix and color, board form detailing, and the cast-in-place integral slots for the window panels. The mock-up served as a critical proving ground to vet not only aesthetics and performance, but also to collaborate with the builder and subcontractor to address issues of constructability that would affect execution of those details prior to embarking on their construction.