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We talk with Doug Burdge, AIA lead architect and owner of Burdge Architects, Malibu. We chat with Doug about what to do first when a home is lost in a disaster and how to navigate the rebuilding process from the architect’s point of view. For more information on Douglas and Burdge Architects go to www.buaia.com
Transcript
Episode 4 Transcription
Jana: Today, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce you to Doug Burdge, AIA, Lead Architect and Owner of Burdge Architects in Malibu. With his team, Doug has designed and created more than 300 residential and commercial projects in Malibu, California.
As the world knows, Malibu’s famous for its magnificent shoreline and unparalleled beauty, but also the land of mudslides, fires, and floods, which can keep an architecture firm extremely busy. There’s no end to the topics I would love to talk to you about, but having lived through a natural disaster with my own home and working as an interior designer on many rebuilding and insurance projects, I’m going to concentrate on the current work you are doing with your clients who are rebuilding from the Woolsey Fires.
I’ve also been working over the past 12 months with two homes that were devastated by the recent fires in our area. I came aboard after both properties were designed by the architect, the plans were approved by the city, and the building process had just begun. Since I’m not usually there at the beginning of the design process, what I want to talk about today is, after the disaster, how does the design process begin?
Doug, your office and much of your work is in Malibu. Do you live in the area as well?
Doug Burdge: Yes, actually, we lived in this area. Our kids went to elementary school here and junior high and high school, but we have a primary residence, and basically, we’ve been living here for, I don’t know, close to 20 years now.
Jana: Wow. Were you affected by the fires, your office, or your home?
Doug Burdge: Yeah, both. More so, my office, actually. My office is outside the eastern end of Malibu or a little close to Pepperdine. We were actually the very first structure in that direction that actually was burning. My insurance people had called me that night. They said, “Hey, listen, I think there’s an incident at your office,” then to come to find out later, a couple of days after the fire, that my actual office, personal office, which was my Airstream, had burned to the ground. So I lost all my possessions. So it was pretty devastating because we’re like the core office. I said, “We can’t let our office burn. We need to be back.”
And then our home was just mostly smoke damaged because we live in the western part of Malibu, by Broad Beach, where our personal home was—so much devastation. We did not lose our home as so many of our clients did. And so, I feel blessed on that end with some smoke damage, but it was devastating all around the whole town. It was crazy.
Jana: Yeah, I can imagine, as you know, that you need to be available to so many people, and your own life is in a bit of turmoil. The one saving grace for me when the tree fell on my house, was that it did not affect my office. My office is 50 feet past the pool, and the roses and snugly in the back, and that would’ve been much more of a disaster for me.
So I can have you back on a future show as one of my survivors, which will be great. Im going to keep a list of a bunch of things we can talk about in the future.
Doug Burdge: Great.
Jana: Tell me a little bit about your firm. How many people are you working with, and how many residential projects do you work on at a time?
Doug Burdge:I’ve had a practice here in Malibu. I’ve been practicing as an architect, someone reminded me, 35 years as of, I think, a couple of weeks ago. So didn’t realize I’ve had my shingle up that long. I’ve had my own business for over 30 years here. We’ve been here in Malibu for a good part of that 30 years. I’ve had multiple offices in different parts of Los Angeles and settled here in Malibu about 20 years ago. It started out with about three people. Now we have about 21, 22 people. We now have a full crew of, let’s say, workers that used to work for me here in Los Angeles. They moved to South Korea and started a whole army of drafting people and architects working there. So now we have a 24-hour operation, which is cool. It helps, and certainly with the fires, to be working remotely, and they were already working remotely.
Currently, yes, the fires jumped the business. We were super busy beforehand. You meet people by being here and having kids go to school here. You get a reputation. One of the biggest attributes of our firm is how you go through the process in a town like this. They hear the horror stories of working with things like the Coastal Commission and whatever, and so we’ve got that as a reputation. We’ve got an excellent team of architects working for us.
One of the best things I did about a year ago, in April of this last year, is I made one of our top architects, Jennifer Hoppel, president of our company. So now I have an amazingly capable person, talented, and a great business mind running the day-to-day. And so, then I’m able to do my design thing and meet the new clients and everything else. So we have a really, really honed team. We’ve been to a new location. We’ve been here for about four years, just past Pepperdine, about an acre and a half property overlooking the ocean. As we talk later today, I’ll go into other businesses we’ve created on our property, like a showroom for rebuilding your house. We have all these vendors and things that we have on our property now, so that’s kind of cool.
Jana: Wow. It sounds like I should be planning a site visit.
Doug Burdge: Well, yeah, no, you got to check it out.
And then the other thing to answer your question is mostly residential. We’ve been loving residential, but as I started doing it, many of my clients are going, “Doug, I think it’s great what you’re doing.” Because inside and outside environments, being in a place like here, I had an office down in Cabos San Lucas for four years during the early ’90s.
And so they said, “You should try your hand in hospitality.” I said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to work in hospitality.” So within a period of the last five years, I’ve gone from zero to six hospitality projects and really nice hotel groups, major hotel chains, local hotels here. We have four hotels here in Malibu that we’re doing, restaurants, shopping centers, and other things just because we’re here. People like our aesthetic, as you commented, by looking at our website, we have worked in all the different styles. It’s been fun. I call it a passion profession. I love what I do. We’ll just keep working. We’re always excited about it. Keeping busy.
Jana: Yeah, that’s clear when one looks at your website and your work and the diversity of it. How many clients are you currently working with who are rebuilding their homes, specifically after the Woolsey Fire?
Doug Burdge: It started out with a large number of clients we were interviewing because we are the largest firm here. People had heard about us and wanted to go to us, so we are interviewing probably close to 50 clients. We’re currently working with about 30 clients. We’ll call some of those the second-tier rebuild, meaning that they weren’t the original fire victim, the one that lost their home in a fire. Clients who possibly purchased their property from the original owner. And so, the rights to rebuild that property with the fire rebuild rules go with the property, so we’re working with four or five new clients that are now working within the fire rules. It’s still classified as a fire rebuild project.
We have most of those under construction right now. It’s been a couple of years since the fire. The city has actually been really good about permitting because it does take a long time to get a permit here in, we call it, peacetime. And then, during the fires, they were working overtime so we have a number of projects, probably about 15 or so, under construction right now of that group.
Jana: Yeah. That does bring up lots of interesting thoughts about selling. Do you sell, or do you rebuild? But how soon after the fire do you start getting phone calls from the first-tier folks that know they want to stay?
Doug Burdge: Well, it was the day after the fire. I mean, we had clients that we actually designed their house, in some cases, I’ll tell you stories, that they were almost done with their house, and the fire took their house away. So we had to start over with the same thing.
We had one client up in Malibu Park that was framed and ready to go and put everything in, and all of a sudden, the fire took the whole thing. A lot of people, obviously you’re devastated, you hadn’t moved in yet. But there’s those types of things or projects you’re about to start, and then that whole thing goes away. They were going to live in the guest house, and that guest house burned down, so now we have to re-imagine the whole project.
We had a bunch of projects that were already affected. Even in my personal house, where my wife and I raised our kids when they were in high school, the house burned down. Those people immediately called me and said, “Hey, I loved your house, it was great. I want to live in the exact same thing.” So,we recreated it. That was our fastest permit. And then others literally contacted me because, remember, Malibu was closed for about a month. You couldn’t get in and out of here, but people were emailing and talking to me and saying, “Doug, whatever you need to do, you’re hired.”
And then about in January of 2019 we started meeting all sorts of new people and talking to them. At that point, we were fully engaged, and we had our whole system down here, first trying to help people figure out how to get their lives together, which we’ll go into a little bit of why I created REBU. And then the second one was actually how to figure out how to rebuild their house. But it was just always the personal things first. People started wanting to think they needed the design right away. I said, “Listen, you got your family to take care of. You’ve got to get your affairs in order, and we can eventually figure out design.” That’s, I guess you could call it, a humanitarian or a lifestyle type of thing that had to happen first.
Jana: Yeah, absolutely. What should the client be looking for in hiring the architect? Obviously, it’s great if they’ve worked with you before. I mean, that takes, I’m sure, a huge amount of pressure and concern off of your shoulders, but someone that’s just starting out, maybe they recently bought, or they’ve been there for a long time, but the house existed, and they didn’t build it themselves, what are they looking for?
Doug Burdge: Well, even back to your other point, I mean, even if the people had hired us before, what happens is that you have a complete shift on how this fire started, how it got to my house, why did my house burn down, and can I do anything differently now for the technology and the materials that we have now differently?
Because let’s say you remodel a house, it was a Cape Cod house with long overhangs, and it had trees near and everything else, and you wouldn’t do the same thing now, right? So, you’re going to create a different shift in the understanding of how it’s different. Listen, Malibu had a fire, but in other places around the country, more so California, every year, there’s a town that’s on fire. I had been in contact with all these other towns saying, “How are you guys doing it? What different materials are you going to use?” So when we then meet with the new client, we’re going to be educated. We’re going to be more knowledgeable on how to rebuild because they’re going to the professionals. They’re going to me in our office to say, “Okay, how can I rebuild better?” Not necessarily for more money, but just better.
Because the budgets, which we’ll talk about in a little while. It’s tough because you might have insurance, but it’s going to be shitty insurance. I mean, maybe less than 5% of people have really great insurance policies, where they said, “Oh my god, I can rebuild for 1,000 bucks a foot.” Those policies rarely exist because you had these insurance policies that you didn’t even look at half the time, and then you realize, “I need $3 million to rebuild my house, and all I have is a million dollars.” or “I need a million dollars, and all I have is $300,000.” These are people with jobs, and they’re well-to-do, but it’s a big ticket. When you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money.
Jana: Absolutely.
Doug Burdge: You can’t necessarily rebuild. The city’s allowing you to build a little bit bigger than you did before, which is nice, and you’re not going to build the same, and you’re going to think about it. My job as a professional is to provide everything out there as far as not just thinking the old way to do it but there’s a new way to do it.
This is not just a fire victim I’m talking about. We apply the same basic background. We live in an area that is disaster-prone. I’m even going to go as far as to say there’s tsunamis because that’s another big ticket thing. The map just came out yesterday as far as zones that we need to think about. So let’s just think about all disasters where an architect is needed. How do you rebuild? It’s not just fire victims, it’s actually anybody now we have to offer the same thing, which is, again, we’ll talk later about our box house experience, seeing different ways to build the basic box.
Jana: Okay. So do you usually bring the client to the builder, or do you get brought in by builders? Are people talking to builders or architects first, or is it range?
Doug Burdge: Well, it does range. It’s interesting. I mean, when I grew up as a kid in the San Fernando Valley, my parents were building a house at the time, obviously before I was born. My brothers were there during that time. And in the old days, you just hired a builder, and then a builder hired a draftsperson, and they did your house. You didn’t hire an architect. The architect was like, wow, what are you building, a museum or something?
And so typically, now we’re mostly known because we can get the permits. We understand the town politically and how it works around here. So we are getting some builders that already know the client. Maybe they’re good friends, and they wanted advice, and they always wanted to know how much it cost per square foot to build a house nowadays. It was mostly because of our reputation they would come to us. But we are referred by other professionals, interior designers. We have a lot of clients, work with a lot of designers, a lot of consultants, realtors, and a lot of engineers who refer us. Most have been primary homes, versus a second home. There were a small number of second-home buyers that live back east, and they didn’t really come here that often. Just spoke to a client this morning from Connecticut, and he was renting his house. He didn’t know anybody, but he had heard that we were the people to talk to. So that’s that example.
Jana: And when you’re working with a client who has not yet selected a builder, if they’ve come to you first, do you have a preferred builder list, or how do you recommend they find a client? What should they look for?
Doug Burdge: Well, yeah, we have a list. We call it the greatest hits. And we have the greatest hits of engineers, builders, designers, people who worked with us before. We get along; we work well. The list was ten builders, now that business builder list is 30 builders because there are a lot more builders that recently came into town.
So now we have a whole other group of builders. I just want to make sure the builder can satisfy both, not just our plans, but can ultimately satisfy the client. So I don’t really have the luxury of knowing that well, but I do know them now because we are working with quite a number of builders. We have over, I think, 22 jobs under construction, and we’re probably out of that group or probably working with ten different builders.
To answer your question, when we start working on the drawings. We tell clients, “Let’s not blindly do a set of drawings. Let’s get builders involved early on,” and start the interview process so they can talk to builders early. They’re going to save a lot more money. Because you have to work with the insurance companies, remember? So we have to know their budget. We say, “Listen, if it’s 1.5 million or two million or three, whatever it is, let’s work with a builder early on, pick him based on his fee, whether he’s a 10% guy or a 15% guy, whatever he is. Then you’re going to feel like you have a team working with you and your budget. Don’t just do the typical designer house and take your wild chances at what it’s going to cost you.
Jana: So, it sounds like you are part of the interview process with the builder, and you’re going to be working with them closeley. You want to know they’re qualified. You’re going to help people vet their options?
Doug Burdge: We have to. The ultimate goal of hiring an architect is not just to draw a pretty set of plans and put it on the shelf. I mean, the goal is to build that object. And so we have to be involved during the whole process. Some clients insist that we’re there every week on the job site, making sure every little detail is carried through, but some can’t afford that.
So then we’re consulting along the way, and they’ll work with the builder. And if I have a builder, Ive worked with for years; they know the little fussy things that I like to make sure to see happen, making sure you’re lining up switches and just little things that I want to make sure happen perfectly.
But yeah, it’s very important. Because in the end, when they move in, if there wasn’t me to be there, let’s say during construction, then there might be some decisions that got off course. They charted the course and had an itinerary, but somebody else took it over. It’s a creative business. You understand that being an interior designer. That the goal is not just to hire you to pick the finishes, the goal is actually to build the thing you’ve created.
Jana: I do.
And how much consultation do you do to get to know the client ? Before you’re hired, do you explain the process options for your envolovement?, “We’re going to do this together, make a commitment”? What kind of process leads up to that point?
Doug Burdge: We have a basic office policy that we always create for the first meeting. I meet the clients here at the office or at their property. We don’t charge for any of that. And we bring our team into the initial meetings to say, “Okay, this person specializes in this. This person specializes in that.”
Because we do a lot of diverse styles, the next step is to listen to the cleint. Let’s say, they had a traditional ranch home, and it burned down, and they’re going to say, “I want a modern home now.” And I’ll say, “Well, I can do modern.” Or if they said, “I had a modern home before, and now I want to do Cape Cod shingles.” “I could do that.”
I guess there’s a limit to what some architects will do, but we always get challenged. I don’t want to be pigeonholed into just one particular style. I want to be known as “this is good architecture.”
So we’ll spend the proper time vetting the client. With the internet now, you can look at images. I tell the clients, “As devastating as it was, you have to still look at things as an opportunity if your family is still okay and everyone is safe and still look at this as an opportunity to change a new chapter of your life. Because you had no control over this disaster, but look at this as not a bad thing. Let’s look at this as an opportunity.”
Jana: Right. I mean, that’s the goal of this podcast because I personally experienced being out of my home for 14 months, and I created a home that I am thrilled with. And that gives us so much opportunity for our lifestyle that I didn’t have before in a home I had lived in for ten years. I got to evolve it, and it truly was an opportunity. That’s why we’re trying to get all this information out to people when they’re first hit with something and are so vulnerable.
How do you begin to educate your clients on what to expect from beginning to end, assuming they never planned to be in a position to rebuild or build a house from the ground up?
Doug Burdge: Well, I think what you have to do is, again, it’s a little bit tricky because the actual homeowner who had the home burn down was dealing with insurance. And most people, when they build a NEW home, whatever income level they are, they have their dreams, thought about it, and they have been planning. In this case you’re thrown into this thing. They were never ever planning on leaving this home or redoing it or whatever. And, now it is just gone.
So there’s a lot of PTSD and emotions at first, and it’s still going on even two years later. So you’re dealing with a lot of psychology and trying to understand the client and try not to make a rash decision on something and actually think about it if they’re still able to. If they have a spouse or are married, they’re bringing their partners in and talking about this.
More and more people are bringing their families into in these decisions because the kids are typically older, and they’re more mature so they can help out. So that was kind of fun when I’ve had family members actually kind of run the job for the parents, and they’re maybe in college even, and they love it. They had never done this before.
Jana: And they’re learning a whole skill set that they would never have learned any other way.
Doug Burdge: Yeah, or they’re bringing a younger vision to this project versus it’s always as a parent, you’re always thinking, “I’m doing this in the best interest of my family.” Well, if the family is smart now and mature, they should have a say. And this might even be their home one day. This might even be something they inherit.
So you have to think about it differently than maybe if you’re just starting out when you’re starting out with your young family. Actually getting some of the kids involved, I say, kids, young adults, into the process has been fascinating because it’s generational at this point. Generational in America is different than generational in Europe and South America, and other places where they’re so used to passing things down within their family. So many families say, “Oh, let’s just sell that house. The kids will be fine.”
Jana: But now, if the family is invested in the house in a whole different way than just having grown up in it, then it’s something that you want to create a legacy. I mean, you get to make all those wonderful, indulgent decisions, and it’s something that should live on with the family and the family name.
Doug Burdge: In most cases, especially here in Malibu, they really loved their property and their location. They loved walking to a beach, park, or mountain.
Most people bought a house that was designed by somebody else. And it’s rare. It’s way less than 5% of people ever would hire an architect to do a custom home.
So every single homeowner, whether they were in their thirties or in their eighties, just had this house, It was just a home. It wasn’t an architectural masterpiece, right? You bought an existing house and just inherited where that bathroom was. You only had that as closet space. The kitchen was only so big.
Now, you’re coming to my office. You’re going to understand that we will hopefully make your life better in a custom home. Because the home is something you’re in all the time, and more so even during Covid.
I’m bringing these subjects up in the beginning to a client, kind of re-educating somebody to maybe the way they thought about something before. So, I can say “This is not costing you anymore, let’s take advantage of this opportunity.”
Jana: Absolutely, Is there much of a difference between starting the process with someone who’s lost their home and is in shock or starting the design process with someone who has been saving their pennies and waiting for the day they get to design their dream home and thinking about it for the last ten years?
Doug Burdge: Well, I mean, there’s going to be because it’s like that was not on your agenda. You were a busy person before the fire, and you were carrying on, and everything was fine. Your kids are in school, and boom, everything is gone, like all your personal possessions. It is the most devastating thing. I mean, besides death, I don’t know, there’s a lot of other devastating things you can get to besides, I guess, financial ruin. There are disasters, whether you’re in Oklahoma and after a tornado or whatever. It’s a disaster.
So, you definitely have to understand and be more sympathetic than someone who’s just doing their daily routine and decides with themselves or however they are. People who have been living with the dream and goal of building a home had more time to think about it. Because you’re reacting then to a situation that you weren’t planning on reacting to. And, as you said, you were hit by this. And any of us that have ever been in an accident or something happened, it’s just a shift in our life, as if that 10 seconds ago, was never planning on having this event be a part of our life, whether it be a health-related incident or a disaster-related incident.
Jana: And how do you prepare these people when they’re coming in for the long haul of the process? Are you able to explain it to them in a way that they can begin to grasp?
You certainly inspire confidence, which is the first step. You’ve had so much experience that when a client starts with you, they feel like they’re connected to a process they know will be somehow successful. But how can you prepare them for the time span and the process ahead?
Doug Burdge: There are a lot of time-span events in your life. You’d love to think that you can design something and start construction within a year. Some people would love to think you can get started in six months. But as it approaches two years, you could get a little bit worried. And then you haven’t even started construction yet, and then you’re under construction for another year or so. And so you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, what’s two, three years from now?” It’s like, “What was I doing two or three years ago?” To think about, “Okay, where was I at that point in my life?”
So you gotta keep them engaged. We offer volunteer design services in our offices. So it’s not just, we can just do the architecture, but we like to think if you have a certain style, we have very talented people. My director of interior design, Jeanette, has a great history. She’s been working for me for over 20 years. So we’ll keep them engaged. We’ll say, “Well, now that we’ve done this basic architectural shape, now we can talk about interiors.”
We’ll keep them going. We have very smart people that work with the permitting process. They guide them. I have a client from New York. Their friend is running the project here. It’s a burned-down property on PCH. Beautiful location, right above Snow Beach. Never met the client yet. She’s in her eighties. Because of Covid she hired us a year later, she couldn’t think about the project, her husband had passed away. But it’s interesting because you haven’t met this client and you’re redesigning their whole house, and she wants the exact same thing.
Jana:Wow. That is interesting.
Doug Burdge: Listen, I’m glad I’m doing the exact same thing. It had history, It was in the movies. It was like one of those cottages you see in a movie, like Windsor Beach or something, and the windswept beach. Anyways, it’s kind of fun.
Jana: Yeah, that’s sort of exciting. It adds to the range of what’s possible between your contemporary pieces and your container pieces, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in the future, and really keeps you interested. So it sounds like you really have a built-in system for taking people through this very traumatic and long process. And you mentioned Covid; how has that affected both the timeline and the work?
Doug Burdge: We are fortunate because of the Malibu fire; we couldn’t come back to our office because it was uninhabitable. A quarter of it had burned up, and we had smoke damage and needed to redo the whole office, which took about three months. So we had to go work all remotely.
We kind of perfected the working-at-home thing. So when Covid hit, we were already ready to go. We just left the next day when they said, “Close down California, don’t go to the office.” And so we got good at it, and they’re fine working at home. They’re going to continue to work at home. The office is more like a place where you’d meet clients and maybe pick up materials, do some printing, or, if you want to get out of the house because your kids are at home, work here.
So we’ve actually got that whole new work situation down. And the whole world has actually gone through the same thing. But we had the first experience to work with. Listen, we’re not in a vacuum. We have to design someone’s house. They have a property that’s in a jurisdiction that has permits. And so the permitting process had to be, if anything, the word expedite, had to be streamlined. There was a fire here in 1993, and the last biggest fire here in 2000, the Craw fire. And so that fire created neighborhoods in the numbers where there were about 280, 300 homes lost, and the Woolsey Fire was about 800.
So our last big fire event when they changed the codes was back in ’93. This was 24, 20 years ago. To us, my firm and a couple of other local architects had to go to the city. We said, “Listen, we got to just change what’s there.”
So we immediately met with the city officials, the head of the city councils, and the planning commissions and everything. Myself, another guy, Lester Tobias, a friend of mine, a local architect, just said, “We’re changing it. In fact, I’m just going to tell you this is the way you should do it.”
And they listened to us. We had symposiums. We got up there. Right in the beginning, we said, “We have to streamline this thing to get rid of all the red tape.” So they were able to. They didn’t have a choice. It’s like, “Okay, we’re in the trenches here. We’re telling you this is what’s happening and you don’t need to do these 10 things. In the end, you’re still going to permit this house and everyone’s going to be happy.”
So that was important to get the process streamlined. The process was a little more of our design, but it’s to everyone’s benefit. So now, when something else happens next year or two years from now, ten years from now, the codes are better suited for a disaster.
Jana: That sounds like an amazing process to inspire the much-needed cooperation between the city of Malibu and the folks that need to rebuild their homes and their lives. We have so much to talk to you about, Doug. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Before you go, I want to congratulate you for winning the 2021 Home Office Design Award in California Homes and Design Magazine. Hope everyone checks it out online. The amazing office space was created by repurposing a fire-resistant shipping container.
I hope everyone will join us on the next episode of Disaster to Dream Home when we talk about the budgeting process and continue our conversation with Doug Burdge, AIA, lead architect and owner of Burdge Architects Malibu.