What Fire Leaves Behind
A house lost. A client's long grief. A smaller, fiercer place rising from the same ground.
SONOMA COUNTY
KINCAID FIRE 2019
I. THE FIRST HOUSE
Twenty-five years ago, I designed a home for a woman I had come to know through a mutual friend. We had something in common before we had anything else. We were both raised in the Deep South, where the relationship between a person and their land is less a preference than a kind of inheritance.
The house I designed for her family sat in the rolling oak hills of Sonoma County, where vineyards terrace the slopes and the summer heat presses down with a particular golden weight. I designed it without air conditioning — this home would be off-grid. The home would live on its own terms, in balance with the climate and landscape.
Long wooden porches and a dogtrot passage invited prevailing breezes through its core. A cupola rose from the stair hall to exhale the day's accumulated warmth into the evening sky. The walls were rammed earth: ancient, thick, tessellated by the color of the place itself.
It was a house that lived where it was.
II. THE KINCAID FIRE
In October 2019, the Kincade Fire ripped through Sonoma County with indifference. As soon as I was able to visit the site, I stood in the ruin of the house and tried to read what remained.
The corrugated metal roof — twisted and collapsed — laid like a shroud over a bed of ash. The concrete slab beneath my feet was still hot. The landscape was singed to gray and umber. Some of the oaks appeared to have survived and some would die in the months that followed, their damage invisible until it wasn't. Outbuildings on the property had escaped entirely. It was the strange, capricious geography of fire.
The rammed earth walls were scorched, but they stood. They were the last witnesses.
In the ashes, I found a bronze horse, ancient in form, modern in spirit. It had lost a leg . I carried it out.
III. THE YEARS BETWEEN
My client was devastated. Not only a house, but the accumulated texture of a life — irreplaceable family treasures, objects carried forward from another place and time to this place She did not reach out to build again for several years. The loss was too close, too total, too raw.
I understood this. Grief has its own timeline, and a rebuilt home is never the same as an unburned one. When she finally reached out to build, what she wanted, was not a restoration. She wanted something smaller, something that gathered — a place for intimate presence.
IV. THE NEW PLACE
My first instinct was to save the rammed earth walls and reuse them in the new design. But, time and weather had worked on them in the intervening years. I came to understand that they carried the memory of loss. They were monuments, not just walls. And, a new client program — smaller, more intimate — did not ask for them.
I decided that the pool would spring from the footprint of the home..
Where fire had taken almost everything, water would now collect. Around this pool, a new flock would gather: a one-bedroom main house, two nearby guest rooms, joined by “the Roost” , an outdoor dining pavilion that had survived the fire.
The design of the new structures faced a different world. This is Wildland-Urban Interface country — WUI designation — and the new code is demanding. Nothing combustible within five feet of a structure. No unscreened crawlspaces, no accessible attic voids where embers might nest. But these structures also learn from the survivors.
I studied the Australian bushfire codes and American insurance institute videos of how homes succumb in wildfire: not from a wall of flame, but from the embers cast ahead — the whirlwind -the relentless, drifting advance party that finds every gap, every vent, every flammable threshold.
WUI is an aesthetic challenge. The vernacular vocabulary — the porch rail, the wooden eave, the board and batten — is precisely what fire exploits.
WUI as aesthetic challenge. Resilient self-reliance.
The new structures are built of board form concrete, and clad in corrugated rusting steel in a random board effect. These honor the memory of wood, without the risk. Windows and doors are protected by automatic shutters. Generous screen porches extend the interior living space — not wooden porches now, but screened porches nonetheless, because this is Sonoma, and the days and evenings still tempt sitting, talking, napping outside The home is off-grid: electricity provided by the sun, stored within a protected cellar, water drawn from a well, held in tanks that feed exterior fire sprinkler system that can dampen the grounds should a fire approach.
It is a fiercer home than the one before it. It is also, I think, an honest one — wearing its armor plainly, making no pretense about where it lives, or how it came to be.
V. 2026; YEAR OF THE FIRE HORSE
We found a bronze artisan to repair the lost leg. The repair is seamless — or nearly so.
The horse stands again, whole in her own way, carrying her history in a form that only those who know her story will read.
There is a niche in the concrete chimney at the front of the new house. That is where she will live: set into the wall, facing whatever comes.
ESTIMATED COMPLETION SUMMER OF 2026