Add The California Post on Google The Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles has long been known for its distinctive homes and innovative architecture, but as one of America’s most expensive communities rebuilds after the 2025 Palisades Fire, it’s starting to look a little more cookie cutter.
Instead of designing completely custom homes from scratch, more homeowners are choosing from catalogs of predesigned houses, sacrificing some uniqueness for a faster, simpler path home.
“When you look around the Palisades now, there’s been great progress. What do you notice? All the homes look the same,” said Matt McRoskey, head of growth at homebuilder Builders Workshop. “You’re not seeing a whole lot of design diversity.”
McRoskey lives in the Palisades. His parents and relatives all lost their homes, and he’s now dedicating his career to the rebuild.
Builders Workshop just debuted four home designs for Palisades survivors to choose from, under a new program called RESET.
RESET is Builders Workshop’s first catalog of predesigned homes, designed to meet the growing demand for a faster, simpler way to rebuild in the Palisades.
RESET says its designs are ready to submit to the city for permitting. It has a set price range, a predictable timeline, and underwriting commitments from insurance companies.
The homes are also built using cold-formed steel, a more fire-resilient alternative to timber.
“This hasn’t been our business,” McRoskey said. “We’re a custom home builder. We’re really good at it, we love doing it. But we didn’t have a catalog of homes.”
For families desperate to rebuild their lives, architectural individuality may not be the first priority.
To build a custom home, it can take years to hire the right team, design the home within budget and secure permits.
And many Palisades survivors are racing against another clock: The expiration of insurance money that’s paying for temporary housing.
“Our solution is the easy button,” McRoskey said. “The first thing you do is you look at the four homes that we’re providing, and if one of them speaks to you, it’s as simple as signing a contract, and then we start building right away.”
McRoskey says RESET also chooses the colors, wood, finishes and appliances.
RESET is competing with the likes of Thomas James Homes, another one-stop shop homebuilder that says it’s working with more than 30 families in the Palisades.
The company is behind the first fully rebuilt single-family home to receive a certificate of occupancy in the Palisades fire zone.
Thomas James Homes offers 12 predesigned home options, with guaranteed pricing and completion within 12 months of the start of construction — plus compensation for every day the project exceeds that deadline.
“We do not have to send plans out to bid. We do not have to hire an architect. We don’t have to hire an engineer nor an outside design team,” said Thomas James Homes’ VP of sales Jeffrey Sandorf. “All of that is under one roof and one price, guaranteed price. That’s it.”
The company says its predesigned plans and in-house team are helping it secure building permits in 54 days, less than half the average time cited by the company for Palisades permits overall.
“Homeowners are dealing with paying their mortgage while they can’t even occupy a house, and they just have dirt, and they have living expenses,” Sandorf said. “Soon that insurance is going to run out. I mean, the faster the better.”
That also means sacrificing to some extent on customization and uniqueness.
“If a property owner wanted to design an extremely unique house to their very specific taste, they probably are not the best fit for Thomas James Holmes, nor a lot of the people rebuilding here,” Sandorf added.
That’s where the traditional custom-design process still has appeal.
Architecture firm Bureau Namas is designing custom homes for clients who are deeply attached to aspects of the home they lost. It’s an emotional process that can involve many months of design revisions, as people’s desires and feelings change.
“The most stressful process for them is not to lose those memories,” Bureau Namas Founder Daniel Shurinov said. “Not to lose those moments in the home that they loved so much, while we’re designing basically a brand new home for them It can be a tiled floor in the kitchen that they all enjoyed cooking barefoot or a porch at the back where they spent countless evenings together.”
It’s a glimpse into how extreme weather is reshaping the character of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods.
As the Palisades rebuilds, homeowners are choosing between the time and complexity of rebuilding something uniquely theirs, and the speed and certainty of a predesigned home.
And those decisions could determine not just how quickly one of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods comes back — but what it looks like when it does.
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