Fire Resilience Starts in the Frame

Last week, Builder magazine published a thoughtful piece by Leah Draffen on five fire-resilient strategies every builder should know: Class A roofs, dual-pane windows, non-combustible cladding, spark-arrested chimneys, and smarter fire-scaping. It is a clear, practical roadmap, and we read it at Neovi with a particular kind of attention.

This is the conversation we have been building for.

The 2025 fires in Malibu, Eaton, and Pacific Palisades killed at least 27 people, destroyed more than 15,000 structures, and caused an estimated $275 billion in economic damage. A year on, with the Sandy Fire burning in Southern California, the question is no longer whether the home building industry needs to take wildfire seriously. The question is how far we are willing to go.

Where the Builder roadmap and Neovi agree

Most of what the article recommends is already standard in a Neovi home.

Our roofs are steel, the Class A material Builder identifies as the most effective defensive element of any home. Our exterior cladding is non-combustible, integrated into the Closed Wall System that arrives on site ready to install. We use European-style tilt-and-turn windows with aluminum frames, the kind designed to resist warping and ignition far better than vinyl. Our walls are engineered with foam insulation behind non-combustible facing. None of that is upcharge or upgrade; it is the baseline we build to.

We agree, too, with the article’s community-level points. Defensible space, fire-scaping with low-resin and high-moisture vegetation, wider roads with two exit routes. These are the kinds of decisions developers should be making before the first shovel hits the ground, not after.

Where we go further

Here is the part of the conversation we want to push on.

The Builder article focuses on what protects a home from fire: the cladding, the roof, the windows, the vents. Those are the right things to focus on, because they are what most homes in this country have to work with. But there is a deeper question underneath: what is the home made of?

A conventional wood-framed home, even with Class A roofing and stucco cladding, is still a wood-framed home. When embers find a way past those defensive layers, as they often do in a major wildfire, the structure itself is fuel.

Neovi homes are framed in steel. Every wall, every panel, every load-bearing element. Steel doesn’t ignite. It doesn’t feed a fire. It doesn’t get eaten by termites or compromised by water either, but that is a different essay.

What this means in practical terms: from the steel roof down to the non-combustible cladding, every exterior surface the Builder article recommends sits, in our homes, on a non-combustible frame. The triple-paned windows and dual-paned sliding doors, all tempered glass in aluminum frames, sit in steel-framed openings. The interior solid surface walls we use in place of drywall are non-porous and free of the paper facing that turns drywall into kindling.

The windows point is worth lingering on. The Builder article identifies window failure as the catastrophic entry point in a wildfire. Once a window breaks, embers find their way inside. The article credits dual-pane assemblies for buying firefighters time, but notes plainly that they are neither fire-rated nor tempered. Tempered glass is engineered to resist thermal shock; when it does fail, it breaks into small dulled pieces rather than the large shards that turn a broken window into an open door for embers. It is a real step up from the standard the article describes, and one we install across every opening, including sliders.

Two more entry points are worth naming. Builder recommends ember-resistant metal vents and screens to harden the roof assembly against airborne embers, and approved spark arrestors on chimneys. Our default design eliminates both vulnerabilities altogether: Neovi roofs don’t include vents, and Neovi homes don’t have chimneys. Where a municipality requires venting, what we install is fire- and ember-resistant. Remove the ember pathway when we can; harden it when we can’t.

We don’t think of any of this as a fire-resilience feature. We think of it as a side effect of building homes the way they should be built, with materials engineered for performance instead of habit.

Why factory-built matters for fire detail

There is a second point worth making about how Neovi homes get built.

Fire detailing (the precise sealing around vents, penetrations, window flashings, and rooflines that determines whether an ember finds a path inside) depends entirely on the quality of installation. On a traditional jobsite, that work is done by different trades, in different weather, under different time pressure. Quality varies.

Our Closed Wall System is assembled indoors, to tolerances measured in millimeters, by the same team every time. Every panel that ships includes its cladding, framing, insulation, MEP, and windows already integrated and inspected. The fire-resistant detailing is not a checklist item on an inspector’s clipboard; it is built into the system.

And one more thing: speed

The article notes that many fire-resilient strategies (wider roads, better access, lower density) require early coordination among developers, designers, and officials. Fair enough. But there is another timeline that matters: the one that starts the day after a community burns.

Traditional rebuild cycles after a major wildfire stretch over years. Insurance, permits, supply chains, and labor all bottleneck at once. Neovi homes are built roughly ten times faster than conventional construction. In a country that is going to keep losing neighborhoods to wildfire, the ability to put a non-combustible, code-current home back on a foundation in months rather than years is not a luxury. It is part of resilience.

An invitation to the industry

The five strategies Builder outlined are the floor, not the ceiling. The next question for our industry is what becomes possible when we stop treating fire resilience as a layer of defense added to an inherently combustible building, and start treating it as a property of the building itself.

We are doing that work in Northern California right now. We would welcome more company.

Neovi builds homes engineered for fire, seismic, and climate resilience from the foundation up, with steel roofs, steel framing, the non-combustible Closed Wall System, and triple-paned windows. Learn more at neovi.co.