In Home That Survived, Joy Flickered Out

It seemed a miracle house. The crisp white stucco walls and red tile roof impossibly unscathed, rising from the canyon’s slope though nearly everything else on Mystic Hills ridge was lost.

The house next door was gone. Across the street, gone. Down the block, gone. Only concrete slabs and chimneys were left--remnants of the homes where people once made their lives--embers smoking here and there.

But Doris Bender and To Cong Bui’s home was still there. The image of Bui embracing the firefighters who saved his home was among the most indelible of the 1993 Laguna Beach firestorm that damaged or destroyed 441 homes and did more than $500 million in damage.

The Bender/Bui home, valued five years ago at $350,000, was uninsured. Bender said she will never forget not knowing what they would find the day after the fire. On the drive up the winding road to the hilltop street, she sat on the floor of a stranger’s van with her husband and young son, fearing the worst would be true.

“The air smelled so terrible, the smell of fire, and we heard on the radio that all of Laguna Beach is gone,” said Bender. “We got closer and everything was in such bad shape. I thought, ‘God. Oh, God.’ ”

They turned the bend and Bui looked out the small back window of the van.

“The house is still there,” he said.

But for Bui, 47, who built the home by hand with a friend, the initial joy has turned to bitterness. Bui, a youthful-looking man with a shock of black hair, wears the disappointment on his face, frustration that his victory never translated into any work. He has called the first year after the fire the worst of his life, saying he felt isolated by neighbors who resented his good fortune.

The Vietnam-born civil engineer built homes in his wife’s native Germany, where the two lived with their four children for nearly two decades. The three-story home on Tahiti Avenue is the first and only he has built in the United States.

It is hard for him to understand why no one asked him to rebuild their home.

He can’t forget the comments of a local architect who dismissed the praise the house had been getting, saying: “If that house had been in the path of the fire, it would have burned too.”

On the wall of the living room, where majestic views of the ocean can’t be escaped, Bui has hung a stark rebuke. The photo of his neighborhood in the fire’s aftermath, his home standing alone in the ruins.

“I don’t understand why people said it was luck,” said Bui, who took special care with fire prevention when building the home, using double-paned glass, extra insulation and careful landscaping.

“If that’s not the fire’s path, then I don’t know what is,” said his wife, who attributes the salvation of the home to her husband’s care, to the firefighters who spent nearly four hours keeping the flames away and to a higher power.

“Do you believe in angels?” asked Bender. “Because I do. I believe they kept a protective bubble over our house.”

Now the homes in the neighborhood, many still under construction, look like the home Bui built. Gone are the tract homes with exposed wood siding and shake roofs. The stucco and tile that firefighters said made Bui’s home savable are now the norm. Many of the homes have more fire protection than even the city’s toughened buildings code require.

Bui said he always meant for his home to last like homes in Europe and Asia that have stood for centuries.

“In California,” said his wife, “they don’t build to last. Fifty years seems like a long time.”

But Bui says it is time for the family to move on. Unfurling building plans for a new home on more than 3 acres he bought just across the canyon, Bui said he once again plans to take many safety precautions. The larger lot, he said, will be less at the mercy of neighbors who aren’t so careful.

With safety in mind, he has also invented a new construction material for homes that should provide more protection from hurricanes, mudslides and fire. He is now looking for an investor to help manufacture the material, meant for use in regions with low earthquake dangers.

His wife hopes the new home, for which the couple should soon have building permits, will cheer her husband. She loves the ocean view and the sun and calls Laguna Beach her favorite city in the world.

“Every day the ocean looks different and the sky looks different,” she said. “Some days the mist comes in and all you can see is the sky stretching forever.”