Buildings and Buildings' Accessories

Culture
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I was far from surprised to see a coupla comments re: the remodel job’s destroying the classic elegance of the original interior - and I’d wager elements of the exterior have also been ill leaned on

MerelyGifted - My tumblr post w/realty site pics, when it was for sale in 2021. ETA: 60+ pics of it are still up at the realty site.

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Too close to the neighbours.

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Garden game is weak too…

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My kitchen would have made her weep.

It sure does me.

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U.S. Navy Still Wants To Operate Out Of This Norwegian Submarine Cave, But A Deal Remains Elusive

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UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

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CityLab

Housing

These Homes Withstood the LA Fires. Architects Explain Why

In Pacific Palisades and Malibu, some houses with fire-resistant designs remained standing amid neighborhoods of destruction.

More than 12,000 structures have been consumed by the wildfires raging across Los Angeles this week, many of them single-family homes that have stood for decades.

A brand-new house in Pacific Palisades designed and built by architect Greg Chasen in summer 2024 could have easily been one of them. None of the other homes around it survived, and a car parked out front by a neighbor was the perfect vector to spread the flames.

Yet on Jan. 9, after a night of devastation, Chasen found the house intact, barely touched by the fire. A photo of the house posted by the Malibu architect went viral on X, and a thread on Reddit swelled with guesses about what saved it.
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see also:

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One of your linked articles begins “Throughout the West, and in much of the rest of the country, fires in the wildland/urban interface are becoming more common as people choose to live in previously undeveloped areas on the edges of cities.”

That’s certainly true for a lot of the fires in California but wasn’t really true of some of the neighborhoods that were lost in the recent fires. Most of the areas of Altadena that were wiped out were old (often over a century) and well-developed. Some were located 10 blocks or more from what could be considered to be the “wildland/urban interface.”

The other thing that a lot of people tend to forget when they criticize the existence of homes on the “wildland/urban interface” is that, unless your town is completely surrounded by farmland or other cities, the structures at the edges will by definition be built at the urban/wildland interface. There’s no avoiding it. I’ve seen a few posts out there suggesting that the thousands of homeowners who lost their homes shouldn’t have built there in the first place, which seems a little insensitive when talking about people who lost century-old homes that had been in their families for generations.

That said, there’s definitely places where homes shouldn’t be built (or rebuilt) and good practices that should be followed when building homes in areas with higher fire risk.

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