This 1963 Pierre Koenig–Designed Home Survived the 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles | House Tour

When I'm in the house, there's an extraordinary sense of calm. Everything feels ordered. There's very little competing for your attention other than the ocean, which on a good day will change a thousand times. You know, the house isn't minimal for the sake of being minimal. My name is Ken Severin. We are at the Beagles House in Pacific Palisades, California, designed by architect Pierre Koenig. The home was built in 1963. I believe entirely in 1963. Pierre Koenig was born in 1925 in San Francisco, California. He attended the University of Utah in 1943 and then was part of the World War II effort, U.S. Army Armed Air Forces Division, they called it then. After the war, he applied for USC, but there was a delay in his application or his enrollment, so he went to Pasadena City College for a period. It was there, that's where he first started studying building science. Then he transferred to USC. Within a year, his experience in the aviation engineering during World War II kind of informed what he would do later. During his time at USC, he built his first house, and from what I understand, he built it himself with really very little labor support. Robert Beagles was an electrical engineer and Alice was a teacher and then later a librarian. Robert had a lot of involvement in this project. This is really a machine for living. There are notes and tags on almost every wire in the house, so when we were going through the project, it was almost as if he were talking to me. He had all these systems that some of the things that he was fighting, we resolved. He had a lot of problems with water intrusion, and so we made a point to resolve those wherever possible. We started in 2023 and finished, for the most part, at the end of 2024, just days before January 7th from wildfires. I got a call from the steward of the Schwartz house, and at first I thought we were just going to come and view the house. The offer was just to view the house, and then I realized that it was a job interview, so I grabbed a stack of all my Pierraconi books. I set them on the staircase and about a week later they hired me. I grew up in a architectural home that Robert W.F. Severin designed. Robert is my uncle, and my father built it, so I had a modern sensibility at a very early age and an interest in architecture. Somewhere around six, I declared myself a modernist of some sort. I probably didn't know the word then. I've worked adjacent to architecture for most of my life. I owned an architectural hardware company, very specialized for many years, specifically the restoration side came by helping friends with project details, small details, then bigger details, just developed. It's really a passion more than a vocation. Among other things, my father had a small aviation business, and so I've restored airplanes, vintage sports cars, a little air-cooled Porsche to a pretty high level. So anything with metal, you know, the hardware, hardware I'm pretty versed in on systems, manufacturing systems, they're just kind of, they all kind of dovetail together. In restoring an architectural home, I mean your biggest enemy is the want for updates, even simple updates, and balancing that, there were a number of challenges. You know, we're dealing with a 60-year-old structure on ledge in a marine environment. One of the things that that we did was when we first took possession of the home, the ceilings had collapsed at the reveals, and the owners wanted me to close them. So in order to save them, we had to tear the ceilings completely out and then replace them. The other thing that about this house is it's extremely sequenced, and all construction is sequenced, but this house is extremely so. There's nowhere to hide, you know, there's nothing to hide any issues. Everything had to be resolved in advance, and he didn't, Kony didn't have the benefit of AutoCAD to catch conflict. And during the restoration process, you know, we worked to keep everything as built. If we rebuilt something, we tried to keep it as built, and I tried to stay as analog as possible with it. When Kony had finished the drawings, he went to the building department to pull permit and discovered they were in an active slide zone. And as a result, he convinced the Beagles to increase the depth of the caissons. They might have even added two, I'm not quite clear on that, and they increased the sides of the grade beams. In just two years, less than two years after, or a year and a half after, or within a year and a half of completion of the home, there was a massive landslide which took out two apartment buildings and quite a few houses in the Castellumare area. And this home was left unscathed. So this is one of my favorite little features in the home, for lack of a better word. This is a plumb bob that is monitoring possible sink either direction, but as you notice, the margin is slightly wider on the right. And Robert fashioned this out of a piece of dental floss and a Habitat for Humanity medallion. I just imagine him drinking his coffee in the morning and staring at this. We are in an active slide zone with a history of slides. It's an important feature. It's extremely analog, which I appreciate. They didn't want the metal cladding siding, so the stucco, I think that was their idea. And I think that was also a fire measure. Also, it's maybe the only house that has a garage. They lived in the home their entire lives, which is, that's an achievement. That is a real achievement. And I think they took great pride in it. Well, you know, it's an older house and it needed some love. For the most part, it was in pretty good shape, you know, definitely from their perspective. The thing about restoring a home is once you open something, everything starts to crumble. You never know. Knowing what I know about Robert and Alice Beagles, I find it interesting that during the 70s, their next door neighbor was Stevie Nicks, which I find it kind of amusing to think of how they interacted, or didn't interact, maybe. There's a Paul Cadovius shelving unit in the office that's original to the home. It's been here since the completion of the home, and we did restore it. Initially, I wanted to leave it as is because it had a nice patina, but it was very sun bleached. At the very end of the project, we decided to restore it. So on the morning of January 7th, at about 11 o'clock, I started getting texts and calls. I'm a native of Los Angeles. I've experienced a lot of wildfire, so I didn't think too much of it. But I started making my way over immediately, and I thought I would sit on the house. As I came down, I got down to PCH. At Temescal, I had a hard stop by a police line. So I parked my car and grabbed my portfolio, thinking I was gonna just camp at the house and sit it out. There was a lot of smoke, but once you came under Temescal, it was dark, and the winds were over 100 miles an hour at that point. So I hiked down PCH. I couldn't come up Sunset. There's a pedestrian bridge just to the north of us. I went over that, and as soon as I crossed it, there were structures overhead 30 feet, completely engulfed. So I turned around, and I went, and I stood in the parking lot at PCH and Sunset, just hoping that the house would make it through. The structure below us had flames on the roof. It was a very dynamic environment, as you can imagine. I called my roofer to ask him a little more about the roof, because I had originally wanted a rock-laden roof. And he said, it's Class A, Kent. It's the best. He just told me that we were in good shape in that regard. Eventually, my phone died. As I was leaving, right before my phone died, I noticed a red light in between this house and the house next door, and I realized it might be a rig. And I left with that, and it wasn't until two days later that we found out that the house had survived. We used a PVC membrane with self-extinguishing properties, and we do think that that helped with the situation. I mean, it's a very simple box with no overhangs. It's one of only two Konig homes with stucco. It's a very slippery box, so the wind just kind of went right over it. Some days that I come in, or nights, I come in, and I'm still kind of taken aback by it. You know, if I haven't been here for a few weeks, and I come in, and everything is in place, you know, I've adjusted everything as, you know, before I left, I am really proud of it. You know, I'm kind of a perfectionist, so we're always looking, you know, we're always looking at the blems, if, you know, if there are any. But yeah, it's a very special home. It's, you know, 2,400 square foot, so it's not a big home, but it's very thoughtful, and every space is a little different. We're very happy with it.