David Brancaccio

Thanks for coming up to the property, Jen.

Yeah, here we are on a rectangular suburban lot.

There is a square where the house used to be just dug out of the earth, and there's some cactus over there.

Not a lot else.

Yeah, it was small by choice, barely 1,100 square feet, two bedroom, one bath with a detached garage.

It was kind of tutory, but it was scaled to what my wife Mary and I needed.

Well, when I see the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance, it's a winter day, but the sun is burning our foreheads.

You're like, I want to rebuild here, but I want to do it right.

I want to do it right in terms of resilience to the next fire.

I want to do it right in terms of energy efficiency and climate change.

And I want to do it right because I got to live in it.

And I want it to look nice and be comfortable.

She was standing right where you're sitting when she said this within moments of us having seen the property burnt down for the first time.

And she said, look, it was 99 years old.

We had the perfect house for the last hundred years.

When we rebuild, we need to build a house for the next hundred years.

Well, what is that?

What techniques do you use?

What building materials?

What design choices?