A First 90 Days Guide for Rebuilding in Los Angeles
The first time I walked a client's lot after the Palisades fire, the only thing left standing was a stone chimney and a sculptural oak tree.
I tell you this not because it's poetic, but because I think a lot about what it actually feels like to stand on the address you raised your children at, where you lived so much life, and try to think about square footage. Rebuilding is not for everyone, it’s a tough undertaking and it’s a circuitous process; but it can happen and it can actually be a wonderful experience.
This is a guide to the first ninety days after you decide you want to rebuild. This is not a checklist, but the version I'd give you if we were sitting across from each other and mapping out what’s next.
Before You Hire Anyone, Three Things to Know
The clock is not what you think it is. The hardest part of rebuilding in Los Angeles right now is not the permitting process, it's the insurance, and it's the financing gap between what your policy covers and what construction actually costs in 2026. Permits in LA County and the City of LA are moving roughly two times faster than they did before the fires. The average time from application to permit issuance is about 85 days. That is genuinely fast. The bottleneck has moved upstream, to insurance settlements and to your own decision-making.
So if you are six months out and feel like you should be further along, you are not behind. Most people are not further along.
"Like-for-like" is not what most people assume. In the Palisades fire area, a like-for-like replacement can modify the existing home up to 10% in floor area, height, or footprint. In the Eaton fire area (Altadena and unincorporated LA County), you get the greater of 10% or 200 square feet. Like-for-like rebuilds do not have to comply with current zoning code — only current building, fire, and health and safety codes. That's a significant advantage and worth understanding before you decide what kind of house you're rebuilding. The trade-off is creative: a like-for-like is faster and cheaper to permit, but you're constrained by the footprint of what was there. A non-like-for-like rebuild opens the door to reimagining the home, but it's a longer road.
This is the most important architectural decision of the project, and it gets made ,sometimes by default, in the first 90 days.
Permitting is suspended in ways most people don't realize. The Governor's executive orders have suspended CEQA and California Coastal Act requirements for fire rebuilds. The City of LA's Executive Order 1 mandates 30-day permit reviews. There are plan-check self-certification pilots, AI-assisted plan review (a partnership between Steadfast LA, Autodesk, and Amazon), and One-Stop Rebuilding Centers in Palisades, Altadena, and Calabasas. The regulatory environment in 2026 is the most rebuild-friendly it's been in California history. If you've been told otherwise, the person telling you that has not been paying attention.
Days 1–30: Stabilize
You do not need to make any decisions in the first thirty days about what you're building.
What you do need to do, in roughly this order:
Document everything that's left. Photograph the lot from every angle. Note the location of the existing utility connections, the driveway, the orientation. Save whatever survives: old drawings, surveys, soil reports, the original permit set if you have it. We can rebuild from almost nothing, but we save you time and money when we don't have to.
Get your insurance settlement in writing, in detail. Most homeowners discover, late, that their dwelling coverage is meaningfully less than current rebuild cost in LA. The number you were quoted in 2018 is not the number it costs to build the same house in 2026, construction costs in LA have risen 35–45% in that window, depending on the trade. Your policy may also have separate provisions for code upgrades, debris removal, additional living expenses, and contents. Each of these is its own negotiation. Get a public adjuster if your settlement feels low. They take a percentage but they almost always increase the recovery by more than their fee.
Do not sign a contract with the first contractor who calls you. After every disaster, the legitimate firms and the predatory ones knock on the same doors. The legitimate ones will tell you to talk to an architect first.
Days 30–60: Build Your Team
This is the most consequential window of the rebuild, and it's the one most people rush through.
Hire your architect before your contractor. I know that sounds self-serving from someone who runs an architecture firm. But it's the order that protects you. An architect works for you exclusively, we have no financial stake in how much your house costs to build. Our job is to translate what you want into something that can actually be built, then to advocate for you through the permit process and through construction. A contractor's job is to build what's designed. Hiring them in that order means you get a design priced against real construction bids, not a design constrained by one contractor's preferred materials and subs.
If you're considering a design-build firm ,one that does both, ask carefully who has authority over budget decisions when the design and the build are in tension. There are excellent design-build firms in LA. There are also firms where "design-build" means "the contractor designs, the homeowner pays." Know which one you're hiring.
Questions worth asking on the first call:
How many ground-up residential projects have you completed in the last five years? (Not renovations. Not interiors. Ground-up.)
Are you a licensed architect in California? (You can verify at the California Architects Board.)
Have you worked on a fire rebuild before? Through which jurisdiction?
Will I work with the principal directly, or will I be handed off?
What is your fee structure? Percentage of construction cost, fixed fee, or hourly?
What's your typical schedule from first meeting to permit?
The last one matters more than people realize. A good architect for a $2–10M ground-up rebuild should be able to give you a credible answer: roughly 6–9 months from first meeting to a permitted set, depending on complexity, jurisdiction, and how decisive you are as a client.
Talk to two or three firms before signing. Not seven. Seven means you're avoiding the decision. Two or three means you're being thoughtful.
Days 60–90: Decide Your Path
By day sixty, you should have an architect on board and the beginnings of a real conversation about what you're building.
Like-for-like, or reimagined? This is the fork in the road, and the right answer depends on three things:
What did you love about the house that was there? If the answer is "the way the morning light came through the kitchen window" — we can keep that. If the answer is "everything, exactly as it was" — like-for-like is your path. If the answer is "honestly, I always wished the kitchen opened to the back" — you're already designing a different house, so find someone who can help you shepard that vision.
What does your budget actually support? In LA in 2026, a high-quality ground-up custom residential rebuild is running roughly $550–950+ per square foot for construction, depending on site conditions, finishes, and access. A 3,000-square-foot Palisades rebuild at the middle of that range is a $2.4M construction budget before soft costs (architect, engineers, permits, insurance) and before contingency. Like-for-like generally lands toward the lower end of that range; reimagined work lands higher. Your insurance settlement, plus what you can finance, sets the ceiling.
There is no wrong answer here. There is only the answer that fits your life, your budget, and what you can carry through the next two years. My job is to help you see all three honestly.
A Few Things I'd Tell You Over Coffee
After sixteen months of these conversations, here is what I keep coming back to.
The right team for a $2M+ rebuild is small. You want an architect who is going to walk your site themselves, not send an associate. You want a contractor who has built in your jurisdiction. You want a structural engineer who has worked with your architect before. The bigger and more layered the team, the more places things fall through.
Permit speed is not the same as project speed. Even with 30-day plan checks, your project will take 12–24 months from first meeting to move-in. The permitting window is short. The design phase, the bidding phase, the construction phase — those are the long ones. Anyone telling you it will be six months is selling you something.
Insurance and finance are the actual constraint. The single most common reason I see Palisades and Altadena rebuilds stall is not permitting. It's that the homeowner has run the math and realized the insurance settlement does not cover the rebuild they want. The earlier you face that math, the more options you have — including the option to redesign to a smaller, more deliberate home that does cover.
Hire the architect whose work you'd live in. Not the most famous one. Not the cheapest one. The one whose finished projects look like the life you want.
It does not have to look like what was there. This was a hard one, early on, in conversations with clients. There is enormous grief tied to the home that was. There is also, sometimes, a quiet permission inside that grief — to build something that fits who you have become, not who you were when you bought the house in 1998. Some homeowners want their exact home back, plank for plank. Others, three months in, realize they want something different. Both are right. Both are honorable. There is no virtuous version of this decision.
When You're Ready
Matter Architecture is a Los Angeles-based, female-founded firm. We do ground-up residential architecture, considered interiors, and we have active rebuild projects in the Palisades on both flat and hillside lots. If you're starting to think about your own rebuild and want a conversation, no proposal required, I'd welcome it.
Email me directly: s@madetomatter.com
The oak tree from that first lot is still standing, by the way. We're designing the new house around it.
Sémone Kessler is the founder and principal of Matter Architecture in Los Angeles. She is a licensed architect (RA) in California, Montana, and Utah, a native Angeleno, and a co-founder of Rebuild LA Architects.