Saving architectural history from the LA fire rubble one tile at a time

Brenda Davidge loved her craftsman-era California home.

Davidge, along with her husband Nick, and children, Jude and Ivy, moved into the Altadena residence in 2016 thinking, “this is it.”

“This is the home we stay in,” she recalled thinking. “We’re not moving anymore.”

A wildfire changed all that. The house was destroyed, turning what was supposed to be a forever home into a rubble of memories. The Davidges are now part of a community-wide mission to save what they can in the wake of the Eaton fire, even if it is just shards of tile or collections of brick.

Built in 1911, the two-story, five-bedroom residence fit the family perfectly and was packed with original craftsman architectural details that Davidge loved. The style, rooted in the international arts and crafts design movement, melds functionality and natural materials with a commitment to handcrafted built elements.

Those elements are "treasured pieces,” she said, “whether it’s the banister or the flooring or the doorknobs or the leaded glass windows, you can’t get those anymore.”

A sizeable stone fireplace in a ground floor living room was another treasured piece, and, although it was just one element of the home Davidge adored, the feature ended up being “where we all hung out,” she said. “Even though we had a separate family room, we would always hang out [in the living room] because of the fireplace.”

Like many other historic craftsman homes throughout Altadena and Pasadena, the Davidges’ fireplace boasted intricate tiles — a finite, and valuable, design element. The Davidges had a horizontal series of cream-colored picture tiles embedded into their fireplace surrounds; they were carved to depict a boy pointing toward a castle ahead.

That fireplace ended up being one of the last things the family photographed before evacuating their home as the Eaton fire tore through Altadena earlier this year, destroying almost 6,000 structures, including 5,600 single-family homes, displacing thousands of Altadena residents.

The Davidges packed their two dogs, two cats, and four chickens into cars and left with only the essentials, not quite imagining the loss to come: Their house, the garage, and their recently completed ADU were reduced to smoldering ash. The only structures left standing on their land were the rotting-wood gazebo they’d been meaning to knock down, and the chimney with its tile-studded fireplace. “It was almost like a grave marker for the property that once was,” Davidge said.

And, because the fireplace and its tiles survived the ordeal, the family was determined to keep them.

Help came in the form of Save the Tiles, a network of local volunteers, historians, and masonry experts devoted to aiding devastated homeowners save what architectural materials they could. The group, formed in January, has been hard at work over the past two months helping to preserve the region’s design heritage.

One of the group's founders, Eric Garland, has deep roots in Altadena, tracing back two generations to his grandparents who settled in the Southern California city in the 1940s. Although Garland was raised in Texas, he and his wife, Amanda, decided to raise their children in Altadena. They even moved into a home that dead-ends the very street where Garland’s mother grew up.

In January, the Garlands were out of town when calls started pouring in from neighbors back home: Altadena was on fire, and their street was burning. The Garlands rushed back to LA, booked a hotel room near Los Angeles International Airport, and refreshed their home security app to see if their house was standing.

The family was relatively lucky — their home had not burned down. But almost all the other houses in the tightly knit cul-de-sac were razed. When the family begged their way into the burn zone to try and understand the scope of the damage, Garland and his daughter Lucy, both avid walkers, tried to retrace paths through the streets they knew by heart, but the whole experience was “disorienting,” Garland, a venture capitalist, said. “There are no street signs, they’re all burned. There are no houses. How do you even mark your place?”

Lucy pointed to one of the ash pits, identifying the rubble of a neighbor’s once meticulously cared-for home. All that stood was the home’s chimney and fireplace, still covered in the gleaming tiles found in so many Altadena craftsman houses.

Those particular earthenware tiles — produced by Southern California artist Ernest Batchelder in the early 20th century — can resell for hundreds of dollars, with complete sets of fireplace tile and tiles framed as art spilling into the thousands. Tiles made by Batchelder’s peers in the arts and crafts movement, such as Clay Craft, sit in many Altadena and Pasadena houses and command similar prices.

Garland and Lucy looked around and saw more fireplaces dotting the rubble, structures now vulnerable to looters aware of the value they carried. Lucy also knew that the fireplace was all that their neighbor might have left of the residence, and she wanted to know if anyone had been tasked with saving it.

“This is a town full of preservations and historians,” Garland replied, “and people treasure the architectural history of Altadena and Pasadena.” He was sure someone was already working on it, but Lucy pressed, so Garland pinged his active neighborhood group chat. No one had heard of anything organized, but one person had come across a Reddit post from the daughter of a local contractor.

“As a local licensed contractor and masonry specialist, my father [Clifford Douglas] is offering to help preserve a small piece of your home’s history,” the post read. “If your home was affected by the fire, he can carefully remove and restore any Batchelder or Clay Craft tile from your fireplace, free of charge.”

Eager to help, Garland and his neighbors arranged a call and discovered that Douglas was donating his business services to homeowners but paying his masons for their work as usual, meaning he was funding the operation out of pocket.

“You may be the nicest guy in the world but that’s not sustainable,” Garland said. Aiming to redistribute some of that burden, the group formed Save the Tiles.

The group first met to canvas the burn zone, putting out a call to volunteers willing to walk through the neighborhood to look for these fireplaces. About 50 people showed up, many more than Save the Tiles had expected, and they began sketching out an architectural survey of Altadena’s roughly 200 remaining arts and crafts tile installations. Without trespassing on private property, Save the Tile volunteers took pictures and videos of the fireplaces they found, data that allowed other volunteers to contact the homeowners and ask, “would you like us to save your tile?”

Saving tile is a skill. Specialized masons can spend years developing techniques, so Save the Tiles knew that while volunteers could do legwork and organize, the nitty-gritty of tile collection is best left to experts, such as Eric Ramos.

Ramos, owner of the Los Angeles business Eric’s Antiques and Architectural Salvage, has been in the field for more than three decades and fell in love with tile early on. He first focused on saving craftsman tiles, pulling them out whenever he could.

“All these early California [tile] companies went out of business in the 1920s and 1930s, so they’re all really valuable unless you have a time machine,” he said. Over the years, Ramos worked with his wife Wanda to hone his work, finessing a technique that sees Ramos delicately remove tiles from the back, coaxing delicate clay out of rigid concrete. Sometimes, Ramos finds himself flying across the United States on tile-preservation commissions that can run between $3,000 and $5,000 a fireplace.

“It’s really hard work,” he explained. “I have the means to hire people, but I have to do it myself.” The removal process is physically demanding, and Ramos, now 57, notes that the hours spent bent over a fireplace can make his hands shake, knees hurt and back ache in ways it didn’t earlier in his career. But Ramos is good at the job, he said, and at the end of the day, “I still love it.”

So, when the wildfires broke out, Ramos thought ‘they’re going to need to save those tiles.’

“People called me right away to come out there, as I knew they would,” Ramos said. But when he visited a site with this first wildfire-victim client “it broke my heart,” he said. “I knew that I couldn’t charge and that I was on a mission.”

Ramos soon connected with Save the Tiles, finding they were all on the same mission. The group has become highly organized in weeks since the tragedy, launching a GoFundMe to support its efforts and offering a framework for preserving the architectural heritage of areas recovering from disaster. Now, all Ramos has to do is “show up and save the tiles. They’re trying to help people and that’s all I wanted to do, too.”

As the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begins bulldozing the rubble in Altadena as part of its cleanup effort to prepare for rebuilding, Save the Tiles is racing against time.

“For us, those bulldozers are a huge looming threat,” Eric Garland said. “We just want to get the tile out before they roll.”

The organization was able to help retrieve tiles from the Davidge property just last week, quickly taking them down, cleaning, numbering and packing the pieces. Davidge chatted with the masons, hearing about how some of her tiles were embedded with shrapnel-like glass — a unique result of something exploding near the fireplace as the fire burned through the house.

With their tiles packed away for now, the Davidge family has started imagining rebuilding. They want to go back to their property, back to the community they miss and — as much as they can — back to what they had. “I know it will never be the same, but I definitely want to get back there. I want to rebuild.”

Whatever form their project might take, the family wants their tiles in it, preserving what they can of their home’s roughly 114-year history and honoring the memories of previous homeowners who also loved the space.

“We won’t have exactly what we lost, but we will have some essence of it,” Davidge said.

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