A New Look for Laguna : Fire-Conscious Designs Are Expected to Add More Variety Than Conformity as the Rebuilding and Replanting Begin

Black and barren hillsides are one of the most striking features of Laguna Beach now, but architects, landscape designers and others likely to be involved in rebuilding the more than 350 homes burned in the Oct. 27 blaze say the renewed city will maintain its charm and be better in many ways.

Unlike the wind-driven blaze that blowtorched the city’s Mystic Hills and Canyon Acres neighborhoods and the exclusive Emerald Bay enclave immediately north of the city, rebuilding won’t happen overnight.

In Oakland, where a 1991 wildfire razed nearly 3,000 homes, fewer than 750 have been rebuilt. Experts in the recovery process say that Laguna Beach will ring with the sound of hammers and power saws for two years or more.

When all is done, however, the unbroken rows of red tile roofs and beige-toned stucco that epitomize many Orange County subdivisions won’t be part of the “new” Laguna, say building and design professionals and city officials.

Instead, they look for a replication--with a distinct Southland flavor--of the more mellow tones of the Riviera and the Early California architecture of the coastal strip from Monterey to the Mexican border.

Much of Laguna, of course, won’t change at all.

The fire damage is in areas behind the ridgelines that separate the Laguna Beach of postcards and summer vacation snapshots from the city where people dwell.

Visitors to Orange County’s most eclectic seaside community usually see just three parts: the “village” area of small cottages and retail shops on the flats along Coast Highway; the panoramic view from Main Beach of steep, tree-covered hills and hillside homes overlooking the village, and the rural, rustic, funky--and sometimes junky--Laguna Canyon corridor. And very little of that Laguna was hit by the fire.

When the the charred hilltops regrow their covering of scrub and grasses and the few jumbled piles of rubble that mark burned homes visible from Coast Highway are cleared away, the tourist vistas will by and large return to their pre-fire look.

It is in less outwardly visible parts of Laguna, parts that city residents know well, that the streetscapes will change as homes are rebuilt and landscaping is replanted.

Architect Robert L. Earl has designed dozens of homes in Laguna Beach, Emerald Bay and other Southern California coastal communities and has been involved in the rebuilding of Oakland and of Santa Barbara after that community’s 1990 fire.

He envisions a community whose architectural style changes because of heightened fire consciousness. And he expects that the voluntary efforts of homeowners and their building and landscaping designers to mitigate fire dangers will far eclipse any controls imposed by local government.

“We need to avoid rebuilding areas so they look like everything is cloned and duplicated, but if you look at the French and Italian Rivieras, you see numerous residences on hillsides overlooking the ocean--just like here,” he said.

“And you see that even though people use similar building materials, a lot of stone and tile and stucco, they have managed over several hundred years to build in quite a wide variety of styles.”

Earl envisions a smorgasbord of homes that includes single-story California Mission and rancho styles with stucco walls and rough barrel tile roofs; two-and three-story Italianate villas with chiseled stone trim and formal, flat tile roofing; ultra-hip contemporary concrete and glass cubes with copper roofs; faux French country cottages, and English manor houses of stucco-coated concrete blocks, trimmed in brick and roofed with real or mock slates.

There is even room in all that, say Earl and other architects, for wood-sided Cape Cods and California beach cottages. However, the roofing would have to be a modern concrete, steel, plastic or asphalt mimic of the traditional wood shingles, which are prohibited in new construction in all of Laguna’s fire hazard areas.

To further minimize fire exposure, the homes in Earl’s catalogue would feature broad stone or tile patios and porches instead of the wood decks that hang from so many hillside houses. Masonry retaining walls and fences would be incorporated into the landscaping both for their look and their fire-retarding abilities.

Aram Bassenian, an architect whose Emerald Bay residence was destroyed in the fire, says that most fire victims will rebuild and that what emerges will be a community that tempers design with a high degree of fire-consciousness.

“You have an attachment to your own house and then your neighborhood and then the community,” he said. “I came here, and all of my neighbors came here, because of Laguna Beach and what it is. It is where we want to be. I think it is a good assumption that people will rebuild with fire safety in mind, so they aren’t burned out again.

“There will be sprinklers inside and out. People with pools will install pool pumps with gas generators so they can use them as reservoirs if there is another fire. People will voluntarily limit the use of wood and overhanging decks and the things that have been shown to contribute to fire.”

One result will be a more contemporary look to a lot of the new buildings--regardless of the architectural style.

“I see closed eaves and a lot less wood . . . cleaner, smoother lines,” said Newport Beach architect Brion Jeannette, who has designed more than a dozen homes in Laguna Beach and Emerald Bay.

“There will be more stucco, but with darker, richer colors to blend into the hills instead of the Mediterranean pastels that stand out,” he added.

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The eclectic nature of the homes--and their bright and sharp-edged newness--will be softened in time by a maturing landscape planned to avoid becoming fuel for a new inferno.

As in Laguna before the fire, Earl said, “it is the landscape that will tie it all together.”

Landscape architects and homeowners also are likely to get a lot more clever about fire protection, and a lot of the native plants previously encouraged by the city are likely to be tossed out because their woody structures and high oil content make them highly flammable.

The dense heavy growth that characterized much of the burned residential area of the city “is not appropriate anymore,” said P. Woodward (Woody) Dike, principal of Dike Partnership Landscape Architects in Irvine and a 26-year resident of Laguna Beach.

“Where there is fire danger, you must limit the amount of fuel adjacent to the structure.

“You can still use things like vines up against homes as softening elements, but we should limit them to the less woody ones like creeping ficus, Virginia creeper and some of the ivies. And having any tree within three or four feet of the house is not a good idea.”

Before the fire, Dike said, “there was a fairly fine texture to the landscaping as you looked up the hillsides. You predominantly saw tree patterns that broke up the architecture on the hills.”

Those trees were mainly eucalyptus, and Dike says they are probably not the best things to replant because of their flammability.

Although most everything that grows also burns, there are trees that resist fire. Among the fire retardant tree species in the city’s 10-page list of recommended plants for Laguna Beach are Western bottlebrush, Catalina ironwood, Myoporum, willow, coast redwood and California live oak.

Dike says landscape issues need to be addressed in two separate zones: the outside edge, where developed areas meet the wild scrub and grasses of the unbuilt hills surrounding the city; and the interior, where issues involve the interplay of landscape and buildings.

On the outside edge, Dike recommends fuel modification zones such as that credited with protecting the Irvine Cove community from the same flames that destroyed 60 homes in adjacent Emerald Bay.

A typical zone is a belt 10 feet wide that is cleared of native vegetation and left unplanted or is landscaped with irrigated, low-fuel plants including ground covers such as California lilac, purple lantana, rosemary--even ice plant.

Laguna Beach landscape architect Meg Monahan--who also heads the city’s architectural design review board--says she is a fan of various succulents but cautions that plantings should incorporate a variety of material so that root systems vary in depth. A hillside planted in nothing but ice plant may help stop fires only to slide down into a neighbor’s back yard after a prolonged, heavy rainfall.

“I have designed some firebreak plantings as cactus gardens,” she said, “and they can be more attractive than ice plant and give a variety of rooting depths for better slope stabilization.”

Monahan said that landscape tastes change along with architectural styles and that she expects the rebuilt portions of Laguna to reflect this, with less dense landscaping and a distinctive ‘90s look.

In Oakland--which is serving as a living laboratory for Laguna residents and officials as they grapple with rebuilding--problems developed when some homeowners replaced modest houses with Gargantuan structures that improved their own views at the expense of others’.

Most of the homes lost in that fire are being rebuilt as “monster homes” that are 50% larger than the structures that burned. One- and two-story houses that burned came back as two- and three-story homes shoehorned onto steep lots and blocking the views once enjoyed by uphill neighbors.

Laguna has taken steps to ensure that it won’t go through the same transformation.

“We are fully aware of the controversies plaguing Oakland,” said Kyle Butterwick, the city’s community development director. “They sent a team of people to Laguna Beach after our fire, and we spent the best part of a day talking about issues of this kind.”

As a result, the city has divided rebuilding into two classes.

People who limit their reconstruction to what essentially is an in-kind replacement of what they lost can do so without going through the design review process again--even if they radically change the style of the home.

The intent is to make it easier to rebuild if the new structure won’t infringe on the views of others. “If they are prepared to keep it essentially what it was, in terms of the massing and scale and location on the lot, and don’t increase the floor space by more than 10%, and all of that on the ground floor, then they are entitled to do that without further review,” Butterwick said.

Any new homes, of course, will have to comply with the city’s building, fire, safety and grading codes. But except for banning wood roofs in fire hazard zones--a prohibition that affects virtually all of the burned homes--those rules don’t have a major impact on architectural styles.

Style will become an issue, however, in cases where a homeowner wants to build a new house that is more than 10% larger than the one that burned, or that is situated on a different part of the lot.

“When it isn’t an in-kind replacement, they will have to go through the design review process,” Butterwick said,

Dividing replacements into those two categories, he said, is the city’s attempt to enable people to rebuild with a minimum of hassle while also minimizing the view controversies that have torn apart neighborhoods in the Oakland hills.

“But in most cases, the city isn’t dictating style,” Butterwick said.

The various homeowner associations in fire damage areas may establish their own community design boards to ensure there isn’t a dominance of a particular design or type of material, he said.

“There is an apprehension that Laguna Beach will lose its (architectural) nonconformity” because of the fire, Butterwick said. “But while other cities have very apparent architectural themes, we don’t want that. Our design rules emphasize eclecticism.”

Monahan, speaking as design board chairman, also said she she doesn’t expect excessive conformity of design--in landscape or building styles--to be a problem.

The homes that burned in Laguna Beach aren’t going to be rebuilt all at once by a single builder using a set of four basic floor plans and three elevations. Instead, hundreds of homeowners will hire hundreds of architects, landscape architects and contractors to build hundreds of individual homes to fit individual tastes.

Even if a dozen people on the same street ordered Mediterranean Revival homes to replace what they lost, there would be a dozen different interpretations of the look.

Rather than less individuality, Monahan suggests the fire will bring a little more nonconformity to the city--especially in the Mystic Hills area, where many of the the homes that burned were part of a 1960s tract development--one of the few in the city.

“I expect we will probably see much greater variety than what we had,” she said.

Visions of Tomorrow

Features that architect Robert L. Earl envisions in rebuilt areas of Laguna Beach:

* Streets wide enough to accommodate emergency vehicles, with broad turnarounds at the end of cul-de-sacs.

* Off-street parking for visitors, to keep streets clear.

* Roofs of tile and other fire-retarding materials.

* Homes built with stucco walls over steel framing or concrete block.

* Broad stone or tile patios and verandas rather than wood decks to reduce use of flammable material and reduce plantings near house walls.

* Masonry retaining walls and decorative fences to serve as additional firebreaks.

* Swimming pools equipped with independently powered pumps, to serve as firefighting reservoirs.

* Fire-resistant landscaping, featuring low ground covers and trees planted away from main walls of home.

* Irrigation systems that could be used to water walls and roofs.