By Sarah Paynter and Libertina Brandt

Catherine Kanner's midcentury ranch in the Pacific Palisades was filled with irreplaceable midcentury furniture and signed first-edition books.

In January, the home and its contents were destroyed by the Palisades fire.

"It's incomprehensible," said Kanner, a book publisher, artist and former design director for the Los Angeles Ballet. She and her husband, architect Winston Brock Chappell, lived on the property for about 35 years. Zillow estimated its value at about $3.5 million, but "it was really what was in the house that was what was special," particularly its rare midcentury furnishings, which had been passed down from her husband's parents, she said.

Their furniture collection included desks and a coffee table they inherited that were designed by the late Archibald Quincy Jones, a midcentury architect who designed the historic Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage. The Kanner home also had an original Herman Miller Eames lounge chair and ottoman set designed by legendary designers Charles and Ray Eames. They paid about $5,000 to restore the pieces, which they also inherited, she said.

Kanner also lost many pieces of her original artwork and hundreds of books that were displayed and stored throughout their house. Her collection included a dozen signed first-editions of the late Michael Crichton's books such as "Jurassic Park," and hundreds of limited-edition printings of books she publishes, which she estimated to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. She also had many pieces inherited from her grandmothers.

"Gone," said Kanner. "So, how do you replace that? I don't know."

Kanner and Chappell plan to rebuild in the same location near a bluff with views of the Pacific Ocean. Their new house will be filled with new, original artwork that Kanner plans to create, and she intends to republish some of her lost illustrated limited-edition books through her private fine-press publishing company, the Melville Press, she said. "It was a beautiful place, and it will be again," she said. The house and its contents were privately insured with a plan that will cover most of the cost of their rebuild, said Kanner.

Thousands of structures were destroyed by the wildfires that scorched parts of Los Angeles County, which began on January 7. As assessors take initial inventory of destroyed homes, well over $1 billion in losses have been cataloged. Inside those lost structures were items of incalculable additional financial and sentimental value; finishes and furnishings, lost examples of fine craftsmanship, art, one-of-a-kind pieces, and family heirlooms. Some of it can never be replaced.

Molly Baz, a popular food writer and Youtube personality, and her husband, Ben Willett, had their first child, a son, last year. In January, they lost their newly renovated modernist Altadena home. It was filled with Willett's custom-made furnishings. The pair bought the house for $1.25 million in September 2020, soon after they moved to Los Angeles from New York, and they gave the circa-1949 house a $1 million to $2 million renovation, completed in 2022, said Baz. Zillow estimates the home's value at about $1.85 million.

"We, obviously, are heartbroken. I haven't felt full-body pain, really, ever in my life until now, where it has a physical sensation," said Baz, who said the loss was particularly hard because of all the work they put into the house. "It'll be a long time before we have a home that feels anything like the one that we lost that's filled with things that have histories to us."

Willett, an architect by training, custom-designed many of the home's furnishings because of pandemic-related supply-chain delays, ultimately leading him to a career in furniture design, he said. One-of-a-kind pieces he designed for the house included a round-cornered credenza, a built-in blue corduroy couch and a three-legged coffee table. Willett also built a modernist tile fireplace hearth for the living room, hand-laid broken pieces of marble as tile on the bathroom floor, and they designed every detail of their all-yellow kitchen, intended to serve as a platform for promoting Baz's work.

The couple also lost antiques and family heirlooms including 1960s armchairs, an antique bar cart, and a framed original drawing of the first house Willett's father, a home builder, ever built, he said. The house had wooden art sculptures and original illustrated prints by the children's book author and artist Esphyr Slobodkina, said Willett.

Baz and Willett aren't sure if they will rebuild or even if they will remain in the area, but the house was insured through California's FAIR Plan Insurance, the state's insurer of last resort for fire insurance that caps home coverage at $3 million. In December 2024, the median sale price of a home in Altadena was $1.3 million, according to Redfin.

Willett declined to disclose whether the value of his home is covered by the plan. They are taking it one day at a time with the support of the people around them, said Baz.

"A lot of people have come to our aid in helping to replace the replaceable things" they need, like a crib and a stroller for their baby, said Baz. Many people who lost their houses don't have the immediate resources to replace their basic belongings, she said. "It's not lost on us that we have a huge support system."

Claire O'Connor, a real-estate agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties, lost her roughly 6,300-square-foot, Cape Cod-style home in the Palisades fire. O'Connor said she is not very sentimental about her belongings. However, she did lose some irreplaceable things in the fire, including a vase she bought in 2012 when she lived in Burundi.

"And I lost that," said O'Connor, "which was kind of like a weird sort of reminiscence of a different phase of my life."

The fire destroyed her home roughly two months after her insurance policy was dropped by State Farm, she said. O'Connor moved under California's FAIR Plan, plus a secondary insurance that brings her cap to around $4 million, about half the home's value, she said.

The most expensive home in the Pacific Palisades, which was built with a 40-foot-tall statement wall that cost $2 million to construct, was also destroyed in the fires. The roughly 20,000-square-foot home sold for $83 million in 2021 and was developed by Los Angeles developer Ardie Tavangarian. The home was also built with a garage that doubled as an event venue with a car turntable that could be transformed into a dance floor, The Wall Street Journal reported. Tavangarian said earlier in January that its owner, Luminar Technologies Chief Executive Austin Russell, was devastated over the loss of the property. Russell didn't respond to a request for comment.

Not far from Russell's property, the Dragon, a three-year project by builders JVE Development and Jae Omar Design, also burned down. Jae Omar, an interior designer who had to evacuate the area when the fires broke out, said it took a few days to learn the fate of the home.

"We heard that particular section or portion of the street was spared; then we heard it was gone; then we heard it was spared," Omar said. "It was this roller coaster of emotions."

"Each one of my projects comes from a deep, deep part of me," he said. "You pour your heart and soul into something for three years and in an instant it's gone."

The roughly 11,500-square-foot, seven-bedroom Dragon house was on the market for $18.5 million. Its exterior was made of dark steel cladding and Japanese cypress wood treated with shou sugi ban, an ancient Japanese technique that chars and preserves the wood. Omar said the wood was treated by a company in Oregon that specializes in the Japanese technique.

A two-story, 19-foot waterfall over bookmatched marble began in the dining room on the first floor and ended in the plunge pool in the home's basement. The waterfall took about six months and roughly $500,000 to install, according to Jae. The stone backdrop was created with four roughly 600-pound pieces of marble that were craned into the home. The stone also featured subtle 45-degree reverse cuts every inch to slow the water as it cascaded down the surface. The speed of the flow could be adjusted.

Adjacent to the waterfall was a glass-enclosed wine cellar and a bar made of the rugged ends of a slab Petit Granit, which is mined in Belgium. Omar said they spent about $1 million on the art pieces for the home.

Joseph Peretz, founder of JVE Development, said they paid around $18,000 a month for insurance with Nationwide. "We're finding ourselves underinsured to a degree," Omar said. "It's pretty reasonable to assume we're going to have to absorb some considerable losses here." Peretz and Omar said that while the loss of the Dragon house is heartbreaking, it pales in comparison to the devastation experienced by those who lost their personal homes. They hope to eventually rebuild on the Dragon's site.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 29, 2025 21:00 ET (02:00 GMT)

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