Marian Berg lost almost everything in the 2017 Atlanta wildfire — not just the Napa, Calif., home she built with her husband, who died in 2014, but all of its contents.
“I was downstairs reading a book and I had a friend call me and say, ‘Your hill is on fire,'” said Ms. Berg, 69, an accountant. “I grabbed my dog and pulled the cables out of the back of my computer, threw it in the car and then ran back for my passport. Then I was out of there.”
He had been through a fire scare before, so he didn’t immediately assume the worst. “I actually thought I was going to come back,” he said.
But a few days later she heard from a friend that the house had burned down. There was nothing to go back to.
Fortunately, it was well insured, so he rented a place nearby while he figured out what to do next. She thought about moving to Florida, but after a year of deliberation decided to stay put because many of her friends and clients—and the horses she loved to ride—were in and around Napa.
Ultimately, Ms. Berg decided to use the insurance money to rebuild on the same sloping lot. But she had no intention of rebuilding what she had built with her husband in the 1990s. This was an opportunity to start over, to build something completely different that reflected the current stage of her life.
After canvassing friends for names of architects, she paid three firms to develop proposals for her. One returned with a design reminiscent of her old two-story house. “It hit me like a kick in the chest,” he said.
Another presented a design she didn’t like very much. But Fischer Architecturea Berkeley firm, proposed a modernist complex she immediately liked: a one-story structure dug into the hillside, with a private courtyard near the street and a living space with glass sliders that would offer an expansive view.
“When we first went to visit, the site was deserted,” said Andrew Fischer, who runs the company with his wife, Kerstin Fischer. “Half of it looked like a lunar landscape.”
“Our thought,” Ms. Fisher said, “was to use that slope of the lot to push the house into the slope, follow the topography and create an oasis for her that would be protected from the rebuilding that was going on and that it’s still going on.”
The design had other advantages. It created privacy, offered more usable outdoor space than Ms. Berg had before, and allowed the single-family home to age in place.
She liked all these ideas. And although she describes herself as a “numbers person, not an art person,” she was drawn to the thought of building something that would be completely new to the neighborhood. “It was so different,” she said. “And I like different things.”
Aiming to make the 4,660-square-foot structure as fire-resistant as possible, the architects used concrete block, a utilitarian material typically associated with warehouses and commercial buildings. But instead of using standard blocks, they found longer ones made with terrazzo-like aggregate and stacked them in staggered joints, leaving some in front of the windows to create screens. Finally, they applied a thick lime paint to the exterior surfaces, so “it doesn’t look like your traditional Costco warehouse,” Mr. Fischer said.
On top of the standing seam metal roof, the home is equipped with a sprinkler system that uses captured rainwater stored in tanks below the pool deck.
Inside, they added oak floors, door and window frames for a warm, natural touch, specifying charcoal-colored Fenix laminate for kitchen cabinets and wall paneling. As for furniture and accessories, Mrs. Berg didn’t need much.
“The interesting thing is that when everything burns, you don’t want anything,” he said. “You realize that all that junk you had, as beautiful as it was, you didn’t really need. It was just something that needed to be dusted off or taken care of.”
Guided by John Stewart, an interior designer friend, bought the minimum number of pieces needed to live comfortably. “There are no curtains, no sconces, no fancy things hanging on the walls, no curtains at the bottom of the windows – none of that,” she said.
It took builder Olson Bros. about two years to complete the house. and Ms. Berg moved in nearly four years after the fire, in October 2021. The total cost was about $6.4 million, about 90 percent of which was covered by her insurance company. (She paid the rest to cover features she didn’t have in her old home, like radiant-heat floors, automated window shades and the pool.)
“You just have to be thankful for what you have,” he said. “And if you’re really lucky like me, you end up with a really nice house to live in.”
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