Hey all,

After the Los Angeles fires in 2025 we sat in a room with a group of homeowners whose street had burned. Twenty-one houses, all of them gone. We went to listen. What we heard was people trying to work out what rebuilding looked like, and many of them not getting straight answers from anyone.

Our bread and butter is commercial. Bigger projects, high skill, high capability. We’ve built houses before, but residential is a different discipline and we knew it. So we had a decision to make as a company. We made it in the room. Be part of the good actors in this space.

About six months later Tony called about a house on Marengo.

Tony Unruh has been at this for more than forty years, one of the early students at SCI-Arc and he obsesses over details the same way we do. When Tony brings us a project we pay attention. Not our first house, but the first one we've built this way.

The house is metal. Metal studs, metal joists, metal siding, metal roof, a fully fire-resistant exterior. In Altadena right now that's the whole point. The problem with metal is warmth. A fire-resistant box can read cold. Tony's design doesn't. The roofline appears simple but no two roof joists of it are the same length.

So we didn't frame it. We prefabbed it.

Here's what that means. Our partner MSC models every piece of the building before anything gets cut. Every stud, every panel, calculated to carry its load. Then they print the studs. They don't pull them off a rack at a supplier, they make them in the factory to the model. Walls, ceilings, and roof get assembled into panels in the shop and shipped out paneled.

None of it works without the front end. The angles, the openings, the connections, the things you'd normally fight on site get solved before a panel ships. That's always cheaper than working them out with a crew standing around. It's an untraditional system, so you front-load the thinking.

My dad remembers metal stud structures going up by hand in the 70s. But printed in a factory, exactly to the model’s measurements, that’s the part that changed.

We’re excited to be a part of rebuilding this beautiful home with Tony and his team and to be doing our part in helping rebuild our city after the fires.