Last year, as other insurance companies fled from California, one startup launched with the goal to help homeowners in the highest-risk areas get coverage. The startup, called Stand, believes that by making targeted design changes, homes can become resilient enough that theyre feasible to insure. While the company focuses on retrofits for existing homes, the same strategies apply to houses built from scratch. We talked to Stands CEO about what homeowners should consider as they begin to rebuild in L.A.and how the right decisions could not just protect residents but begin to deal with the states insurance crisis. Protect yourself from the house next doorIn Pacific Palisades, part of the fire danger came from the fact that homes were densely packed together. If the home next door is burning, thats a problem for your own house not just because the flames may spread, but because the blast of heat can cause damage.One small step that can help: using tempered glass in windows. In any window thats facing anything burning, one of the biggest risk points is that the glass will break from the heat, and then embers will fall inside, says Stand CEO Dan Preston. Its a way a lot of these homes ultimately burn down. So you want to have tempered glass, which dramatically improves the odds that it wont break. Other materials on the house should also be fire-resistant, from the siding to the roof, to protect them from embers blowing through the air.A tall stucco wall between yards can also help stop the spread of fire. In the L.A. fires, some of the homes that survived had this feature. Built-in sprinkler systems, which spray exterior walls with water and flame retardant, are another solution. (One example is from a company called Frontline, which makes a system that attaches to a house with reserves of water and foam, and which automatically turns on when a fire is within range of a house.) Preston says his team had previously been cautious about how well sprinkler systems work. But the recent fires proved their effectiveness. Weve found a couple of examples where they basically saved the home, he says.When rebuilding from scratch, homeowners should also consider a new layout. If a house has a smaller footprint, for example, that means there can be more space between it and the neighbors. If theres at least 15 feet between your home and the next one, as long as your house is built with the right materials, your chances of surviving are much higher, says Preston.[Photo: Jay L. Clendenin/Getty Images]Keep embers outTerrifying videos from the L.A. fires show embers flying through the air, propelled by hurricane-force winds. Most houses in wildfires ignite because embers make their way through gaps at the bottom or top of the building. Once an ember gets inside, its hard to avoid the house burning down.Making sure that theres flashing (thin strips of metal) around the edges of your house, and that vents are covered with an ember-proof mesh, can keep embers out. These are not huge changeshundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars of changes, says Preston. They can be pretty minor things. And that can be the difference between losing your multi-million-dollar home or not.Jim and Nancy Evans Malibu home survived the Palisades fire even though many of his neighbors homes didnt. After the Evans previous house on the same lot burned down in a wildfire in 1993, he rebuilt a fire-resilient structure with a metal roof, steel-reinforced walls with cinderblock at the bottom, double-paned windows and 6 feet of stone encircling the house, clear of vegetation. The rest of his yard is landscaped with fire-resilient succulents and oak trees. Evans believes his home survived due to its hardened design and defensible space. Photographed on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025 in Malibu, CA. [Photo: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images]Maintain defensible spaceThe first five feet around a housewhat fire agencies call Zone 0is the most critical place to avoid having flammable objects, whether thats wooden deck chairs, trash cans, or a pile of dead leaves. If embers fly into your yard and ignite something close to your home, its almost inevitable that the fire will spread to the house itself. Inside that five-foot buffer zone, the ideal landscaping might be stones and small, high-moisture plants like cactus. A little farther away from the house, its fine to have trees, though the type of tree matters. (One of the lessons of the L.A. fires was that palm trees are especially flammable, since they tend to have dead branches near the top; native oak trees are safer.) Trees also need to be trimmed correctly. Stand uses models to advise homeowners about where limbs should be cut to make it less likely that the crown can catch on fire. If a house is built with the safest materials, theres more flexibility with landscaping. If you have tempered glass and you have fire-resistant siding, you can actually have more vegetation near the home because its less likely that the home will be lost in those cases, Preston says.The more that houses are built and retrofitted with these strategies in mind, he says, the more that insurance rates can go down. Thats true not just for the individual homeowners making changes, but for the market as a whole. The thing that really drives insurance costs is not just the likelihood that your home will burn down in a year, its the likelihood that your whole neighborhood gets lost, he says. If you could demonstrate that these fires no longer burn down 10,000 homes, but burn down 10, its not going to just reduce your insurance costs by 10% or 20%. It could cut it in half.