1 week ago
11
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
In mid-February, a real estate agent, Simon Beardmore, invited me to a showing of a $6.5 million house. I pulled up to a pale gray minimansion with eight bathrooms, ocean views, walnut floors and a “chef’s kitchen.” A few minutes later, Beardmore arrived with the prospective buyers, a married couple and their teenage daughter. They told me I could follow them inside if I didn’t print their names.
Listen to this article, read by Robert Petkoff
They wanted to be anonymous because of the price and the sensitive location of the property. Set on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean, this was one of relatively few houses still standing in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, which had otherwise been leveled by one of the most destructive urban wildfires in United States history. The couple had been planning to close the deal on Jan. 7, the day it ignited. Instead, they started watching the flames.
Facing the water, we could see burned-out lots, studded by chimneys and the odd surviving staircase. But across the street, many houses remained intact. Unevenness was one of the jarring aspects of the fires. On some streets in the Palisades, toxic-debris crews had pulled the batteries out of the skeletons of Teslas, and National Guard soldiers ran checkpoints from 13-ton tactical vehicles. On the next corner over, a Postal Service van might be delivering mail to the addresses that still existed, while a gardener watered the lawn. Beardmore unlocked the door, and we stepped inside to the entryway.
“Smells a little like smoke,” the husband said.
When I asked him what he was thinking, he told me he felt unsettled: The inside looked almost exactly as it did before, but you knew something horrible had happened — you could feel it in the air. He bent down to look at a section of the floor, where a pile of ash had formed. Then he and his wife went down to check out the basement.
Beardmore, an Australian in his mid-50s, stepped outside onto the lawn. In his view, he said, the house would need a lot of work. At a minimum, you’d have to pay for smoke and ash remediation, stripping every surface that the toxic ash had permeated, then replacing it. “You have to take it down to the studs,” Beardmore said. “There’s ash in the ceiling vents. Ash inside the walls.” Real estate agents in the Palisades had coined a word for houses like these. They called them “smokers.”
