The Manzanita House
[TOPIC: California Rebuilds Design Competition | Award-winning passive house design | Wildfire-resilient housing | Fire-resilient building science | Passive House + fire safety | Fire-resistant materials | High-performance windows | Enhanced air filtration | Defensible space + buffer zones | Prefabricated passive construction | Faster post-wildfire rebuilding]
Late last year, we were delighted to be recognized with not just one but two awards through the California Rebuilds Design Competition: second place in the Spanish Colonial Revival group and the Students Choice Award. Congratulations to the entire team that worked on this project!
This competition, hosted by The Passive House Network and Passive House California, challenged architects across the country to help people in wildfire-prone areas to build or rebuild using fire-resilient and passive building principles. The judges looked for high-performance buildings that utilize passive building standards alongside considerations of fire resilience, cost, and age-in-place design.
We entered the competition because we wanted to inspire today’s architects to build better homes and to lean into all that building science can do to make homes safer and more durable.
We also wanted to educate ourselves about fire resiliency and to stretch our application of these principles into locales outside the Pacific Northwest. Creating our design, The Manzanita House, gave us an opportunity to think about how to design houses from the ground up that will resist or delay damage during a wildfire event in order to minimize or eliminate the necessity to rebuild or to create a safer space for occupants until (or if) they need to evacuate.
Our Experience
Because the Pacific Northwest is also prone to wildfires, some of our designs already include firewise design.
Our Temenos Passive Timberframe Octagon, for instance, uses fire resistant materials on the exterior, such as charred cedar, which is innately harder to ignite than raw or even finished wood and slows the burning process if it does ignite. It also has an unvented roof with metal roofing, which prevents embers from burning through and igniting the inside of the home. A timber structure with stone-clad concrete bases helps prevent flame spread from low fires; since timbers take a very long time to burn, using them as framing gives inhabitants more time to evacuate.
What We Learned
During our research for the Manzanita House design, we took a deep dive into how fire, embers, heat, and smoke can damage structures and harm the inhabitants. The fire-resistant siding, roofing, and decking materials that we’ve incorporated into other designs are good places to start but to really make a structure that’s resilient, you need to construct the whole thing to withstand and resist heat.
We gained valuable insight by studying homes that withstood the fires in Los Angeles, reviewing local LA fire-resistant codes, and doing deep research as questions arose. Along the way, we kept asking ourselves, 'What more can we do to prevent further damage if our first line of defense is compromised?'
With that, here are some things we included in our design:
Strong, Fire-Resistant Materials
For the house envelope, we worked from the outside in, starting with a terracotta tile roof and stucco walls. These materials are inherently fire-resistant and fit one of the competition requirements for Spanish Colonial Revival design. Next, we looked at sublayers, adding densglass fireguard gyp sheathing, rockwool insulation, and a non-combustible weather-resistant barrier. The roof deck was covered in concrete pavers, while the front porch featured colorful ceramic wall tile and flooring.
Controlling Embers
Flat roofs, as well as overly complicated roofs, can collect embers, which can burn holes in the roof, drop into the house, and burn it down from the inside out. To mitigate this possibility, we designed a simple pitched roof, where embers are less likely to settle, and made sure to include multiple layers of fire-resistant materials.
We included gutter covers—embers can settle in gutters and burn debris inside them, which can then set the roof or siding on fire. We also blocked exterior venting paths with a mesh firestop to prevent embers from being sucked underneath the roofing or into the rainscreen, a vented cavity between the siding and the structure that allows any moisture that collects behind the siding to drain and evaporate.
When windows shatter, embers can enter the interior of the home, putting it at risk of burning from the inside. Double or triple-pane windows resist heat and are less likely to shatter.
Passive building already includes a robust filtering system as part of the heating, cooling, and airflow systems. For this design, we bumped it up even further, adding HEPA filtration to the system to capture harmful fine particles (PM2.5) in smoke, which is crucial for indoor air quality during fire events.
Creating A Buffer Zone
Around the exterior of the house, we created space to discourage fire from reaching the structure. This includes hardscaping around the structure with rock beds and sidewalks, keeping plantings at least five feet outside the structure and trees at least 10 feet away.
The Manzanita House did not include additional structures or privacy fencing around the home, but we learned that these are just as likely to be the culprit for igniting homes. If the design called for a shed or small structure, we would have taken similar precautions with the building materials. For fencing, we would ensure that only non-flammable structures are used against the house, such as metal gates or non-combustible fencing instead of wood.
Quicker Construction
Our design uses prefabricated panels. These panels, constructed to passive building specifications, are constructed off-site and delivered ready to be fitted together by a construction crew. Prefab panels are a crucial tool for helping people rebuild speedily after a wildfire and to address the limited labor pools that exist in California and elsewhere.
Contact Us
We’re proud of our design, delighted about the recognition, and hopeful that this design will be built in the real world in order to help people return to their neighborhoods and live with greater peace of mind. If you’re interested in this design, contact us.
© Artisans Group Architecture + Planning — Sustainable Architecture, Passive House, and Passive Building Design Experts
Posted on December 01, 2025
