Marianne Berg lost almost everything in the 2017 Atlas Fire, including the home she built in Napa, California with her husband, who died in 2014, as well as all of her belongings.
“I was downstairs reading a book and a friend called and said, ‘Your hill is on fire,'” said Mr Berg, 69, an accountant. “I grabbed my dog, pulled the cable out of the back of my computer, threw it in my car, went back to get my passport and left.”
She had experienced fire scares before, so she didn’t immediately assume the worst. “I actually thought it would come back,” she said.
But a few days later, a friend told him his house had burned down, and he had nowhere to go.
Luckily, she was well insured and rented a house nearby while she figured out what to do next. She considered moving to Florida, but after a year of thinking about it, she decided to stay because many of her friends, clients and the horses she enjoys riding were in and around Napa.
In the end, Berg decided to use the insurance money to rebuild her home on the same slope. But she didn’t want to recreate the one she and her husband built in the 1990s. This was a chance to start over, to build something completely different that reflected her current stage in life.
After asking friends for architects’ names, she commissioned three firms to create designs. One of them came back with a design that reminded her of her old two-story house. “It was like a kick in the chest,” she said.
Another proposal was a design she didn’t like as much, but the Berkeley firm Fisher Architecture proposed a modernist structure she immediately liked: a single-story building carved into the hillside, with a private courtyard near the street and living spaces with glass sliders that offered expansive views.
“When we first got there, the place was a wasteland,” says Andrew Fisher, who runs the company with his wife, Kirsten Fisher, “and it looked like half a moonscape.”
“Our idea was to take advantage of the downward slope of the site and push the house into the hillside, following the topography and creating an oasis for her that was and is not affected by the ongoing reconstruction work,” Fisher said.
The design had other benefits too: It provided privacy, more outdoor space than Berg’s previous home, and the ability to retire on a single level.
She liked all of those ideas, and although she describes herself as “more of a numbers person, not an art person,” she was enthralled with the idea of ​​building something entirely new for the area. “It was something very unusual,” she says, “and I like unusual things.”
To make the 4,660-square-foot building as fire-resistant as possible, the architects used concrete block, a practical material often used in warehouses and commercial buildings. But instead of ordinary blocks, they found long blocks made of an aggregate similar to terrazzo, which they stacked on top of each other, spaced apart in front of the windows to create screens. Finally, they applied a thick coat of lime paint to the exterior, so “it doesn’t look like a traditional Costco warehouse,” Fisher said.
Featuring a 3D seam metal roof, the home is fitted with a sprinkler system that uses rainwater collected in a tank beneath the pool deck.
Inside, they added oak floors, doors, and window frames for a warm, natural feel, and specified charcoal-colored Phoenix Laminate for the kitchen cabinets and wall paneling. In terms of furniture and accessories, Berg didn’t need much.
“The funny thing is, once everything burns down, you don’t want anything,” she says. “You realize that all the junk you had, no matter how beautiful it was, you didn’t really need it. It was just stuff that needed to be dusted off and taken care of.”
Following advice from her friend, interior designer Jon Stewart, she bought just the bare minimum of furniture she needed to live comfortably: “There are no valances, no sconces, no fancy things hanging from the walls, no drapes hanging below the windows, nothing like that,” she says.
It took builder Olson Brothers about two years to complete the home, and Berg moved in in October 2021, nearly four years after the fire. The total cost was about $6.4 million, about 90 percent of which was covered by insurance companies. (The rest was paid by Berg for amenities that weren’t in his previous home, like radiantly heated floors, automatic window coverings, and a pool.)
“You should be grateful for what you have,” she says, “and if you’re really lucky like I was, you’ll have a really beautiful home to live in.”
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