The Altadena Residents Rebuilding by Moving Historic Homes Across Town

When Evan Chambers and his wife, Caitlin, lost their century-old, 980-square-foot bungalow on Mountain View Street in Altadena, California, to January’s devastating Eaton Fire, they knew it would be a struggle to rebuild. The couple was underinsured, with the California Fair Plan cutting them a check for just $300,000 in the wake of their total loss, and with projections for new builds running anywhere from $500 to $700 per square foot, Caitlin says she quickly knew that reconstructing “our tiny little house would be super expensive.”

Scrolling around on Instagram, she stumbled across a post on a history-focused account called Before The 101 alerting followers to the potential demolition of a 2,400-square-foot, 1911 Craftsman-style home in Hollywood. The owners were tearing it down to make room for a multiunit affordable housing project—which the city desperately needs—but Caitlin says she felt like it would be a shame to see the house go to waste. “I didn’t think I would be able to get that specific house, but I started thinking that [moving a house] was something I wanted to do,” she says. “It was only a couple of weeks after the fire, but I thought that maybe I could do it eventually.”

Fortunately for the couple, Evan’s dad helped move a home from Pasadena to Altadena in the 1970s, doing rockwork on-site once the house was situated. (Fun sidenote: In the ’90s, that same home played Dylan’s residence on Beverly Hills: 90210.) “We’d always talked about moving maybe a boxcar or a caboose to our lot,” Evan says. “I would never want to live in a new house, really. I just have zero interest in doing a new build.”

A one-dollar sale

Through friends of friends, the Chamberses got hooked up with architect, creative director, and fourth-generation Angeleno Morgan Sykes Jaybush of Omgivning, who had long been interested in preservation of historic properties. “I was doing some work on some new construction rebuilds in Altadena, and it hit me like a lightning bolt: Why couldn’t we relocate houses like they used to do in the old days in L.A. when they were building the freeways or downtown?” Jaybush says. “People were looking at doing prefab houses in Altadena so I was putting all the pieces together, like, Why can’t this be a different version of prefab? Let’s find a way to relocate houses instead of throwing them into the landfill. Evan and Caitlin were thinking the same thing around the same time and within two days of us both having that epiphany, we were working together.”

Jaybush reached out to an acquaintance, retired banker and active preservationist Brad Chambers (no relation), who previously moved five classic but threatened Victorians from one L.A. neighborhood to another. Over time, Jaybush says, Chambers has figured out how to break down homes into component pieces that fit neatly on flatbed trucks, making the often-tricky moves both easier and cheaper. “If you move a house in one piece,” Jaybush says, “you have to move streetlights and cut trees and relocate power. If you partially deconstruct and cut a home, you can’t get on the freeway and just drive it across town but you can figure out a way to get there a little bit at a time, avoiding railroad tracks and overpasses and difficult intersections.”

With Brad Chambers’ guidance and experienced team of house-moving construction workers, Jaybush pushed forward with Evan and Caitlin, somehow managing to track down the owner of the original home Caitlin had seen online. The couple offered to buy the house from the developer for $1, saving the company the cost of demolition, and a deal was struck.

“It’s a beautiful home,” Evan says. “When we were starting this process, I drove around L.A. a lot looking at possible houses, like the oldest farmhouse still surviving in L.A. and other places that are in danger of being demo’d. Some of the houses had bad vibes or were too big or crazy or had low ceilings or whatever, so I just kept going back to that original house. It’s got original architectural features, like a lot of wood I can strip to expose the Doug fir, and there’s really just no problem with it. It’s not like there are a thousand options, either. There are like forty houses being demo’d in L.A. at any given time, two of which you might be able to do in your timeline and one of which might smell just a bit less like piss.”