They Built a Home to Fend Off California Wildfires. But Will They Stay?

They had built their house on a rugged peak in the Santa Monica Mountains to maximize the views, and now Phillip and Claire Vogt went to their bedroom window and saw fires burning in the nearby canyons and black smoke rolling across the Pacific Ocean. The olive trees in their yard bent sideways in the wind. Helicopters flew over the ridgeline carrying loads of water. They could see one wildfire moving in from the north, barreling toward their children’s elementary school. Another encroached from the east, burning through an acre every few minutes.

“We’re in the middle of a disaster,” Claire said, last week. The fires had already killed at least two dozen people and destroyed thousands of homes, and forecasters expected another few days of dry weather and high winds.

“We prepared for this,” Phillip said. “We have a plan. Now we just stay calm and start getting everything ready.”

They had spent the last decade constructing one of the most fire-resistant homes in the country — a beautiful, Spanish-style estate that was also a fortress meant to withstand even the worst of California’s worsening natural disasters. Phillip and Claire had both grown up nearby amid the region’s annual wildfires, and Phillip, an architect, understood the precariousness of building a home in Malibu, on nature’s wild edge. Their house had heat-resistant windows, a fireproof clay roof, walls made of concrete instead of wood, and vents stuffed with steel wool to keep embers from flying into the house. The property ran entirely on off-the-grid power in case of an outage, and it was surrounded by about half a dozen private fire hydrants, high-power water pumps and tanks that stored more than 50,000 gallons of water.

The house had already survived one historic California wildfire in 2018, the Woolsey fire, which destroyed more than a thousand other nearby homes. Now more catastrophic fires were underway, and Phillip and Claire didn’t trust the local government’s ability to respond. They believed their house could withstand any worst-case scenario, but lately they had also begun to wonder about the toll that exacted on them.

Phillip, 48, went outside and hiked into the gullies to cut away brush and chaparral until there was nothing flammable left within several hundred feet of the house. The property spanned 80 acres, and on a clear day he could see 50 miles in every direction, from Catalina Island to the snow-capped peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. Some of the nearby houses belonged to reclusive celebrities or billionaires who lived elsewhere and visited every few months, but the Vogts had invested everything in their house — their time, ambitions and life savings. They were married on the land when it was just a construction site, and then they spent about $3 million building much of it themselves. Their plan was to turn the property into an event site for weddings and retreats. They planted a cork oak near the top of the hill, where Phillip told Claire to spread his ashes when he died.

Phillip’s phone dinged with another emergency alert. “Extreme Red Flag Fire Warning,” it read. “Remain vigilant and prepare to evacuate.” He walked back toward the house, inspected the fire hose and tried on his protective firefighting goggles. Claire wrote letters to their children, hid them inside their suitcases and then dropped the children off to stay at their grandparents’ house farther away from the fires.

“What haven’t we thought of yet?” she asked once she was back at the house, standing on the deck with Phillip and reviewing their plan in case the fires reached their property.

Phillip said he would position himself outside on the north edge of the house, facing into the flames and shooting the fire hose at any blazes that threatened their property. Claire would stay inside, where she could gauge the forecast, run the sprinkler system, monitor their water levels and occasionally turn off all the lights to see if any glowing embers had penetrated the attic.

“The house is ready for whatever comes,” Phillip said. He’d dreamed of being an architect ever since he was 7, when he started traveling to job sites across Southern California with his father, a contractor. He had spent his childhood exploring underneath houses and building imaginary forts at the end of the Cold War, fortifying his designs against Russian attacks, anticipating every potential disaster.

He had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional construction expenses to make their five-bedroom home resistant to fire. But what he had come to find even more costly were the hundreds of hours spent clearing brush, the uncertain forecasts, the constant vigilance and stress.

“Maybe it would be better if you evacuated and went with the kids,” he told Claire. “You don’t have to stay here.”

“It’s our house,” she told him. “We’re in this together.”

Phillip had been alone during the last disaster, on Nov. 9, 2018, when he arrived at their property expecting to finalize some paperwork with a banker and then move into the house after six years of construction. The banker was late, and Phillip lost himself in work until the banker called and explained that he couldn’t make it to the house because the surrounding roads were all closed. A wildfire in the Woolsey Canyon had jumped across a 12-lane freeway and spread into the Santa Monica Mountains. Phillip looked outside for the first time in an hour and saw flames climbing the hills. He called Claire, who was safe with the rest of their family at her mother’s house, beginning to panic.

“I guess this will be the live test,” he told her. “It all looked good on paper, but we’ll see how the house holds up.”

He saw no obvious paths of escape and no fire trucks or helicopters on the horizon, so Phillip walked outside in his dress shoes and khakis to fend off the fire. There was another house still under construction on their property, a home that Phillip had been designing for a friend, and he was determined to save it.

He connected his fire hose to one of the private hydrants and climbed a few hundred feet down into the canyon to meet the fire. Heavy smoke obscured the sun and made it feel like twilight. The fire sounded like a jet engine preparing for takeoff, and he could hear distant propane tanks and boxes of ammunition detonating in the heat. He aimed the hose at burning chaparral, but the blaze kept advancing up the hill. The heat burned his fingers. His vision blurred and his eyes swelled in the smoke. A fireball exploded forward, singeing his eyelashes, torching his neck and melting the hose off the hydrant, leaving the hose dead in his hands.

He ran back up the hill as the neighbor’s house ignited behind him. The windows exploded. A 40-foot wave of fire consumed what was left of the roof. Embers rained down like fireworks and lit the pathway to his house. A mile down the hill, he later learned, another family was trying to escape when their car caught fire, and two people burned to death inside.

Phillip called Claire and tried to steady his voice. “It’s bad — I’m trying to salvage,” he told her, but what he was thinking was: I’m probably going to die.

He made it back inside, closed the door and surveyed his house. The power was still on. The sprinkler system was working. The air inside was clean, because the fireproof windows had sealed out the smoke. All of the alarms were functioning in unison, having detected the smoke outside. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” the alarms kept repeating.

Phillip raced around the exterior of the house, checking for embers and spraying distant hot spots with water, protecting what had become an island in the fire. He looked down the mountain and saw that he was surrounded by an apocalypse: endless miles of charred black hillsides, mansions reduced to moldering foundations, and dozens of burned-out cars. He worked for several more hours until the fire moved well beyond the house. He walked out to his Prius to make his escape, but the road was littered with melted guardrails, downed power lines and boulders that had rolled down the mountain during the fire.

He put the car into park and started to text Claire. “I’m stuck,” he wrote, but then he saw a helicopter flying toward his property. The U.S. Coast Guard had spotted his headlights, and they picked him up and flew him to the Los Angeles suburbs, where nurses and firefighters treated his wounds.

A few days later, he drove back into the mountains with his family to check on their property. The Woolsey fire had burned through 100,000 acres of land, but his house was still standing. He opened the front door, walked inside and found more than a dozen firefighters watching television and playing cards in the living room. “What in the world are you doing here?” Phillip asked.

They told him that they had been looking for an emergency base camp, and the safest place to stay during the wildfire ended up being his house.

The fireproof vents had kept out embers. The clay-tiled roof had withstood the heat. The entire house was unscathed, but it turned out that Phillip was not: Minor burn treatments. Eye surgery from the smoke damage. Survivor’s guilt. Nightmares that made him wake up shouting that his body was on fire.

He had spent the past six years trying to reconcile with the personal fallout of what ecologists called a once-in-a-lifetime forest fire, but in the last week an even more destructive fire had made its way across some of the same land, burning over scars that never had time to heal.

“Red Flag Warning,” read the latest alert on his phone, as the most recent fires continued to burn.

“Prepare to evacuate,” another message read, even though their house was still several miles outside of the evacuation zone, and it looked like the worst of the crisis was behind them.

Claire monitored the weather report on her phone. Phillip checked the news. Each story was another indignity. There was an empty reservoir in Los Angeles County, overgrown state forests, under-resourced fire departments, mismanaged water and political dysfunction — a steady stream of evidence that the state and the county had failed to guard against a wildfire with the same rigor as the Vogts had. For months, Phillip had been volunteering to clear away the dead undergrowth on the parkland surrounding his property, but California officials told him he could be fined for meddling with a sensitive habitat. He’d asked if he could lay netting along the road to prevent the mudslides that often followed a forest fire, but officials denied him.

He had spent the last years trying to help people rebuild after the Woolsey fire, teaching neighbors about fire-resistant construction and even building two homes himself for longtime residents who were underinsured. But several of the new homes in Malibu had been built by investors with short memories, people who wanted to spend their money not on fire prevention but on square footage and landscaped palm trees. Phillip glanced out the window and saw a mountainside of fresh tinder.

“All the alerts bring back those anxieties,” he said to Claire. “I snap right back into go mode. It’s the way I cope.”

“We have to be totally self-reliant,” she said. “It’s a lot. It’s exhausting.”

They sat at their kitchen table and looked out the window. The sun was descending into the ocean, bathing their deck in pinks and blues. They had never managed to host many events on their property, in part because some of the surrounding area remained a moonscape. The cork oak where Phillip wanted his ashes spread had burned down in the last fire.

More and more, they had begun thinking about leaving, and in the last few months they had started speaking to a broker about putting the house up for sale. They wanted to downsize, simplify and start over somewhere new. The winds were dying down now and the firefighters were making progress, but the next disaster was coming.

“Whether that’s tomorrow, next month, or in a few years,” Phillip said. “It’s a matter of time before it happens again.”

Maybe their house was prepared to endure whatever came next, but the same no longer felt true for them.

“It’s time to get away from here,” Claire said.

“A fresh start,” Phillip agreed. “And probably somewhere out of state.”