What problem were you trying to solve?
For most of my career I worked in construction, manufacturing, and industrialized building systems, as a general contractor and a structural engineer by training. What I kept running into wasn’t really a design problem. It was a delivery problem: too many trades, too many handoffs, and too much of the schedule and cost sitting outside anyone’s direct control. Buildings hadn’t gotten dramatically better over the years. They’d mostly just gotten slower and more expensive to put together, with more risk sitting in the field than it needed to.
Why build a factory-manufactured system instead of changing how buildings are designed?
Most construction technology asks the industry to change too much: new materials, new code paths, new financing questions. We wanted the opposite. 4C manufactures the structural frame and building-envelope components—including exterior wall panels, interior partitions, and roof and floor framing—as one coordinated, factory-built system. But the finished building still goes through the design, permitting, financing, and inspection process a project team already knows. It’s a normal building. We just changed how it gets put together, and moved more of that work into a controlled factory environment instead of the field.
“Our job isn’t to argue that conventional framing is wrong. It’s to make sure that where fire performance matters more than usual, a manufactured, code-listed alternative is actually on the table, and easy to build with.”
4C SAFE™ is fire-rated. Was that always part of the plan, or a response to recent wildfires?
It was part of the plan from day one, well before the Eaton Fire. 4C SAFE is a steel-framed, non-combustible system, engineered and code-listed for one-hour and two-hour fire-resistive assemblies, and WUI compliant for wildland-urban-interface construction. We built it that way because California’s wildfire exposure isn’t new and wasn’t going away, and manufacturing gave us a way to hold that level of performance consistently, panel after panel, in a way that’s harder to control when an assembly is built field-condition by field-condition. When the Eaton Fire happened, the system didn’t have to change. The need for it just became a lot more visible, and a lot more urgent for the families going through it.
Even after major fires like Eaton and the Palisades, most rebuilding is still done with conventional framing.
Why do you think that is?
Familiarity and availability, mostly. Conventional framing is what most contractors, subcontractors, and lenders already know how to price, permit, and schedule, and after a loss like that, most homeowners are being asked to make dozens of decisions quickly with a general contractor they trust. Changing the framing system is one more decision, and it’s reasonable that not everyone wants to take that on in the middle of a rebuild.
That said, some of it is genuinely well suited to the project. We build 4C ECO™, our wood-framed system, for the Type V construction where a wood assembly is the right fit. This isn’t a case for one material over another. It’s a case for treating the frame and envelope as one designed, tested system instead of a stack of separate field decisions, especially on a site where fire performance matters more than usual.
What does 4C look like in practice, on an actual jobsite?
Components are manufactured to the project’s actual drawings while site and foundation work move forward in parallel, then they arrive pre-labeled and installation-ready. At Borrego Springs, a single-family residence project, the full SAFE envelope came together in under a week, in genuinely difficult desert conditions. That’s the outcome we’re building toward on every project: the schedule and quality control that come from doing more of the work in a factory, without asking the project team to change how they design, permit, or finance the building.
For someone rebuilding in Altadena right now, what does actually starting with 4C look like?
We didn’t want anyone to be handed a blank sheet of paper on top of everything else they’re already dealing with. So alongside SAFE™ itself, we put together a pre-designed Altadena program: a main residence available in a modern design or a Spanish Revival design, each around 2,522 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths, plus a matching 516-square-foot ADU built on the same SAFE™ system. The ADU is also available on its own, for anyone who just needs the second unit. None of that is meant to replace a homeowner’s own architect or designer — it’s a starting point that’s already engineered and code-listed, so the design conversation has somewhere to begin instead of starting from zero.
View the Altadena Rebuild Brochure →
What’s next for 4C?
Right now we’re focused on where this matters most: the Eaton Fire rebuild program in Altadena, the fire rebuild work in the Pacific Palisades, and new single-family and multifamily construction across California more broadly. Longer term, the goal is the same one we started with: make a manufactured, code-listed building system the default way normal buildings get built, not a specialty option people only consider after a loss.