Through the Fire

After a catastrophic blaze, an art collector couple taps Jamie Bush to design a home that is built to last.

- Camille Okhio

In a ruggedly picturesque hilltop abutting the Los Padres National Forest in Montecito, California, stands a home that's a monument to self-sufficiency. But it wasn't always that way. The owners, a worldly husband and wife with a passion for collecting art, had made peace with their middling Spanish Mediterranean-style house when the devastating Thomas Fire of 2017 tore through the property and forced a new beginning.

The couple had intended to rebuild their previous home as it was when designer and architect Jamie Bush came on board, pushing them to consider a different direction entirely. To accommodate building laws, Bush suggested a house with the exact same footprint but pared back, with hyper functional interior architecture. It would be constructed, with the help of architecture firm Shubin Donaldson, from hard-wearing materials, most notably fire-resistant standing seam metal cladding on the exterior. "We wanted to heed the lessons of nature by collaborating with the environment and our immediate surroundings," the wife says.

"The idea for a fire-resistant home came out of the concept of The Machine in the Garden," Bush says, referring to Leo Marx's 1964 book about industrialization's mark on the natural world-a favorite in architecture programs. "We thought about the romanticized aesthetic of the man-made within a bucolic setting." The designer looked at outbuildings and sheds as references, structures that often go unnoticed but prove to be most useful. "I love the idea of industrial, modest materials that recede into the landscape," he says.