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This is the question many are asking as they seek answers after losing their home to a wildfire. What can they do to avoid returning to a lone chimney standing in the ashes of their lost home? Must they rebuild with a structure looking like a bunker? The clear answer is no.

Harrison Woodfield Architects in fire-scathed Santa Rosa, California is at the forefront of home designs that resist wildfire destruction, while delivering the traditional grace and beauty of a well-architected home.

Sara Harrison Woodfield, the firm’s principal, has been designing such homes for decades, as she is reluctant to even consider a conventional wood-constructed home in the fire-prone Wine Country of Northern California. “Rebuilding a burned-down home with the same techniques that helped destroy it earlier, is simply not the way to go,” she states. “We have ways to make a home almost wildfire fireproof, using non-flammable and heat-resistant materials! And like the old wood-frame construction, these building techniques make the home earthquake resistant, as well.”

Woodfield goes on to say, “There is no reason to suspect a competent architect can’t design with the beauty and warmth of conventional designs when using fire-resistant construction materials and techniques.” To prove her point, Woodfield offers examples of just such designs.

“Build” Magazine 2020 Architecture Awards

Harrison Woodfield Architects is the recipient of the following BUILD Magazine 2020 Architecture awards:

• Lifetime Achievement Award in Custom Home Design – Pacific States
• Best Contemporary Hawaiian Residential Design Project: Coastal Hawaiian Residence

BUILD magazine published its first issue in 2015 but is still considered to be a relatively new face in the construction industry. Despite its youth, the publication provides a fresh look at the sector as the only globally focused construction magazine. Its distributions span a worldwide network of more than 110,000 dedicated and informed industry experts. Compiling the latest trade news with featured case studies on the industry’s leading organizations and professionals, the magazine is a comprehensive source of industry information which covers all aspects of buildings, infrastructure and related works.

Click Image to View Weather Channel Video

In her continuing campaign for home construction methods to defend against wildfires, Sara Harrison Woodfield was recently nationally featured in a Weather Channel video describing the vulnerability of conventional wood framed home construction.

Harrison Woodfield pointed out that fire-engulfed wood frame homes are even greater threats to adjacent homes than the trees around them, as all the fuel ignited creates immense heat and major threats to fire spreading. She states non-flammable solid-wall construction can defend homes from such domino effects. As old homes continue to burn in California’s wildfires, new designs can prevent the constant fear of having to rebuild over and over.

Harrison Woodfield Architects is a leader in wildfire defense for home construction, and the firm is reluctant to design conventional wood construction for homes in wildfire prone areas.

Santa Rosa architect Sara Harrison Woodfield is a leading architect reducing wildfire risk for homes vulnerable to wildfires. Hers has been a decades-long crusade, with Harrison Woodfield being one of a handful of Wine Country architects who is strongly reluctant to design wooden homes in wildfire prone areas. She favors noncombustible materials like RSG-3D, a thick fire-retardant foam panel sandwiched between wire mesh and coated on both sides with concrete. Home builders are gradually becoming more aware of such materials. Harrison Woodfield has worked with and recommends one such home builder fully-experienced in using noncombustible materials like RSG-3D, Gateway Builders, Inc. located in Santa Rosa, CA.

Surveying rebuilt homes in neighborhoods almost totally destroyed by wildfire, Sara comments, ““If you drive around, you will see one wood-frame house after another — which will blow away pretty easily in the next fire,” she said. “My argument is always, why wouldn’t you do something different if you could afford it financially?”

Her crusade is “catching fire,” especially now in current times with California and other Western States being devastated by the worst wildfires in history. More than 7,900 wildfires have burned more than 5,300 square miles in California this 2020 year. Even as her new fire-resistant projects emerge from the ashes of burned homes, smoke from nearby wildfires cloud them.