The Foothill Catalog Foundation
The seed for The Foothill Catalog Foundation (TFCF) was planted while the Eaton Fire was still raging last January. Alex Athenson and Cynthia Sigler, husband-and-wife architects, were sitting on an air mattress at the home of a friend after evacuating their own residence in northwest Pasadena, hard by Altadena. The couple’s home mercifully survived the inferno, but thousands of others in their tight-knit corner of Southern California did not. “As members of that community, we were afraid that the identity of this special place might be lost. As architects, we also understood how hard it is to build a home, even in the best of circumstances,” Athenson recalls. “We tried to devise a model that could make quality architecture and design attainable to as many people as possible,” Sigler continues.
The couple founded TFCF to streamline the rebuilding process for fire survivors of most severe need by offering pro bono fully designed, detailed, and engineered construction documents preapproved by LA County, obviating the time and expense of design and permitting. After researching the sizes and styles of the homes that were lost, Athenson and Sigler put out a call to volunteer architects for houses and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) ranging in size from 500 to 2,500 square feet, in a broad array of design idioms reflecting the area’s eclectic character and history. The speed at which their endeavor gained traction is a testament to the outpouring of support from the design and construction communities.
Thus far, they have ushered 20 homes through approvals, with the goal of reaching 50 unique home designs. To expedite the resurrection of Altadena, Athenson and Sigler have partnered with San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity. The first TFCF house welcomed its occupants in early 2026. Hundreds more are in the pipeline. “Our job is to inject hope and optimism into the recovery efforts,” Athenson says, “and to see that hope embodied in real homes and families returning to Altadena.” —Mayer Rus
Collective
Talking with friends and neighbors who had, like herself, lost their homes in the Eaton Fire, interior designer Kelsey Sundberg often heard the same refrain: Their new places just didn’t feel right. “People lost their sense of home,” she reflects. “That’s something you get through touchstones around you, souvenirs that elicit memories.” Teaming up with her friends Cole Billik and Bixby Halford, she started Collective, an organization that helps people source missing furniture and replace or re-create objects of sentimental value. For one household, that meant working with ceramist Dust to Dust on new lighting. For another, they provided thoughtful furnishings for their at-home preschool, inviting woodworker Vince Skelly to collaborate with the family’s teenage son on a cedar side table. As Sundberg explains, “Now, they’ll be living with a piece that he had a hand in making.” —Hannah Martin
Case Study: Adapt
In the years after World War II, the legendary Case Study program presented bold new models for modern life, soliciting leading architects of the day to design low-cost, efficient residences. The results, concentrated in Los Angeles, include some of the most iconic homes of the 20th century, among them the Eames House and Stahl House. Reviving and expanding that mission today is Case Study: Adapt (CSA), an ambitious initiative launched by Leo Seigal and Dustin Bramell to rebuild in the wake of the city’s devastating fires.
“Our primary mission is to make climate resilience cool and to educate homeowners about fire-resistant systems,” reflects Seigal. (He is also the cofounder of the interior-design platform The Expert.) “We know what the best strategies are. The biggest issue is adoption.” Adds Bramell, an entrepreneur who lost his own midcentury house to the Pacific Palisades disaster, “CSA is not only about rebuilding our homes—it’s also about restoring an optimistic view of how we live.”
Since launching last year, CSA has enlisted 10 local firms: Assembledge+, Bestor Architecture, Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects, Geoffrey von Oeyen Design, Johnston Marklee, Marmol Radziner, Montalba Architects, Standard Architecture|Design, Walker Workshop, and Woods + Dangaran. Concepts for the first 16 houses debuted this past November, the mix offering bold alternatives to run-of-the-mill developer designs while honoring the spirit of the original Case Study roster. Think: open plans, interior courtyards, and palpable connections to the great outdoors.
As intended, urgent strategies for resiliency emerge, chief among them the use of noncombustible materials such as stucco and metal, ember-resistant venting, and perimeters of five feet or more—all guided by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. Environmentally conscious ideas manifest in the form of photovoltaic panels, deep overhangs to diminish solar gain, and cool roofs. But the through line is great design. Says Seigal, “If you can put forward beautiful ideas that use fire-resilient systems, that will inspire a whole new generation of building.” —Sam Cochran
Angel City Lumber
Following the Eaton Fire, which claimed 19 lives and destroyed more than 9,000 buildings, Jeff Perry and his “treemates” at Angel City Lumber faced the same dilemma confronted by so many: how to fathom the unfathomable. “Everyone was scrambling to respond in some meaningful way,” says Perry, who founded the LA-based company with the mission of connecting Angelenos to nature by honoring fallen neighborhood trees and converting them into building material. “There were food drives and clothing drives, but we asked ourselves, ‘What do we already do?’ The answer was, ‘We do wood.’ ”
The twin imperatives of doing wood and doing good dovetailed in the launch of the Altadena Reciprocity Project, a program in which fire-damaged trees destined for chippers and mulchers have instead been repurposed as appearance-grade millwork lumber earmarked specifically for rebuilding lost or damaged homes. Working with the Army Corps of Engineers, Perry and his team collected roughly 1,500 logs from Altadena and the Angeles National Forest at a site in Altadena’s Las Flores Canyon, with the goal of milling 2.5 million board feet in the next three years. The wood, priced well below market value, is available exclusively to residents of Altadena and their designers and contractors—proof of residence is required, and no markups are allowed.
“Altadena has always been a vital part of our business. The people there love their trees and natural surroundings. This is our way of ritualizing and celebrating those trees,” Perry muses. In addition to the Reciprocity Project, Angel City Lumber joined forces with the progressive LA design gallery Marta and artist Vince Skelly in January to mount “From the Upper Valley in the Foothills,” a group exhibition in which more than 20 local designers—among them Ryan Belli, Dan John Anderson, Doug McCollough, and Shin Okuda—crafted objects and furnishings from chunks of timber salvaged from the fires. —M.R.
Save the Tiles
Roaming their Altadena streets in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire, Eric Garland and his teenage daughter Lucy couldn’t help but notice that a neighbor’s fireplace surround had emerged nearly unscathed. “Who’s going to save that?” he recalls her asking. “It was the only thing that had survived.” Thus began their efforts to salvage and preserve the area’s historic tiles, many of them by Ernest Batchelder—a Southern California artist known for introducing Mission and Arts and Crafts ornament to the local vernacular. What started as an ad hoc meeting in a parking lot has since grown into a full operation of volunteers, who have now rescued pieces from roughly 200 homes. Some finds remain in storage while their original owners rebuild. Others will be rehomed. One prime specimen from the historic Pueblo House, commissioned by the novelist Zane Grey for his secretary in 1923, was even acquired by the Huntington library and museum. —H.M.
Project Chimney
Where others saw devastation, artist Evan Curtis Charles Hall, the founding director of LA’s House Museum, discovered moments of poignant beauty. Surveying the ruins of the Palisades fire, he was gripped by the sight of charred chimneys—sentinels of memory and loss now untethered to the homes they once warmed. “They were alarming, but they were also uncannily beautiful,” recalls Hall, who hatched an ambitious scheme to salvage the surviving masonry structures for a Palisades Fire memorial, a venture he dubbed Project Chimney. Of the six he was able to preserve, three were designed by renowned architects Richard Neutra, Ray Kappe, and Eric Lloyd Wright. (The others bear the pedigrees of illustrious early Angelenos and manufacturers.) Hall is currently raising money to permanently install the chimneys in the Santa Monica Mountains. “I think of it as a place of reflection and encounter, a place that speaks to the past as well as the future,” he states. —M.R.
Seven Houses
Anthony Zimmitti, a seasoned builder based in Pasadena, will never forget the moment he first saw the blaze. “I was born and raised in LA, so I have seen fires my whole life. But this was unique. The need for help was immediate.” So began his and his wife, Gina’s initiative to support displaced families. Named Seven Houses, the project aims to construct just that though its potential to scale is great. To streamline the process, Zimmitti enlisted his friends Michael Breland and Peter Harper, founders of the interdisciplinary design firm Breland Harper, one of AD’s 2024 New American Voices honorees. They have in turn conceived historically sensitive plans in three styles: midcentury, Craftsman, and Spanish Revival (above). “We are going for a standardized approach, but also trying to create homes that will last,” reflects Zimmitti, anxious at the prospect of cookie-cutter houses replacing the city’s architecturally significant stock. The first of their initial seven has already gotten off the ground. —S.C.
Want to Help? AD is proud to partner with The Foothill Catalog Foundation and San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity to help rebuild homes in Altadena. Click here to donate.
This story appears in the March issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
