Los Angeles builders could frame 10 houses in the time it takes to build one if more of them learned to use cross-laminated timber, with one Altadena family’s new house rising from bare foundation to framed shell in two days. That is according to David Brancaccio, host of the Marketplace Morning Report, who wrote on Friday that his family lost its old house to the Eaton fire and was then told by a state official that wildfire rebuilds take an average of 3 to 5 years.
“By dinner time Wednesday, you could see walls and ceilings bolted into position,” Brancaccio wrote, with a local general contractor and a framing crew of six visiting from San Diego starting from a bare foundation at breakfast two days earlier. Austria’s KLH Massivholz, which says it opened the world’s first cross-laminated timber plant at Katsch in 1999, shaped the panels and cut the window and door openings at what Brancaccio called a distant sawmill.
He and his wife, Mary, chose the panels over what he called the standard kindling, and Brancaccio wrote that the prefabricated shell would still become a small, custom house rather than a standardised design. The house cannot be lived in until the roof and services go on, though he wrote that, “if the stars align”, the family might spend its first night home soon after the fire’s second anniversary in January.
Australian-born developer Aaron van Schaik was already building with the same factory approach in Los Angeles before the fires, with his firm SuperLA opening the SuperBungalows in Silver Lake as Southern California’s first multifamily building made from cross-laminated timber. SuperLA claims its system cuts design, permitting, and construction from 36 to 60 months to 12 to 18 months, with van Schaik saying the current production process is “like if Toyota designed a custom car for every buyer and assembled it in every driveway”.
Daniel López-Pérez, a professor of architecture at the University of San Diego, had a 540-square-foot mass timber prototype for his start-up, Polyhaus, standing in his La Jolla backyard within weeks of the fires. López-Pérez said last year that he could deliver a fully assembled unit in six weeks, with costs starting at US$300,000.
“With mass timber, the three layers are sealed with no air gaps, making them much more fire-resistant,” he said. López-Pérez estimated that the material chars at half an inch an hour, enough for a 4.5-inch panel to hold off flames for six to seven hours.
“All those homeowners have a future tragedy on their hands,” Ken Calligar, chief executive of RSG 3-D, which makes insulated concrete panels, warned last year of the 98 per cent of California homes he said have wood frames. Wood still framed 94 per cent of the 1,005,000 single-family homes Americans completed in 2025, the National Association of Home Builders found in its analysis of US Census Bureau data this month.
Still, a timber-clad house that architect Greg Chasen designed on Passive House principles was left the only home standing on Iliff Street in the first days of the fires, in a Pacific Palisades neighbourhood where more than 5,300 houses had by then burned. Chasen credited a solid concrete perimeter wall and a design with no vents or eaves, but wrote that “we were also very lucky”.
“Building with CLT at that scale would require more sawmills around the country to prefab the wood panels to the individual specifications of homeowners,” Brancaccio wrote. His own panels came from KLH, which says it runs two production sites in Austria and supplies the United States through a subsidiary in Portland, Oregon.
“You’re going to have a Hunger Games-style competition for materials and labour,” Sean Burton, chief executive of the Los Angeles multifamily developer Cityview, warned three weeks after the fires. Burton urged government, homeowners, and contractors to buy building materials in bulk, even if it meant storing supplies in vacant warehouse space.
Meanwhile, Fabric Mass Timber, which turned to Cal Fire and the US Forest Service to identify salvageable thinnings, had slated construction of California’s first large-scale mass timber factory, a 200,000-square-foot plant at Redding, to begin this northern autumn. The plant is designed to turn trees removed through hazardous fuel reduction work into building products, with Ben Mickus, a partner at WRNS Studio, saying at the time that a lot of that lumber is “just turned into wood chips”.
