The robotic arm that's trying to rebuild parts of the Palisades and Altadena

In the Pacific Palisades, at 16855 Livorno Drive, a 2,000-square-foot contemporary home once stood. Today, a flag blows. “COSMIC,” it reads — short for Cosmic Buildings. Also on the lot: a glass-front temporary structure and a white tent.

They stand out amid the destruction but are otherwise unassuming. Inside, though, is a powerful tool: a robot programmed to frame houses.

That’s the Cosmic pitch — building custom homes faster and more precisely. Now, the firm has set out to help residents in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena rebuild after the Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed thousands of homes in January.

“We’re removing the biggest labor need of building a home and making it more efficient,” Landon Nash, co-founder of Cosmic Buildings, told Homes.com. “Instead of having to place every board and swing a hammer, this does it. We remove the human error; this is more precise.”

The key differentiator for a Cosmic-built house isn’t the robot so much as it is the software controlling that robot. The machine itself is not unique. It’s the proprietary technology that enables the robotic arm to construct the panels, which ultimately form the frame of a home.

“It’s really like Legos, or if you remember Lincoln Logs,” Kent Newmark, a native Palisadian and a member of the Cosmic team, told Homes.com in an interview. After the robot crafts the panels, they're delivered to the general contractor at the build site, where they're pieced together by the construction team.

That system eliminates human error and allows the team to “do things in parallel, not sequentially,” Newmark said.

“When we build these panels, we can start cutting the floor for the home and then we can start laying the floor, and that’s because we know that this robot will build with precise dimensions,” he explained. A human, however, creates more variation — even if it's just a half-inch difference — which can set back the construction timeline.

By streamlining that process, Cosmic’s technology can, for example, build the structural panels for a 2,500-square-foot home in about two days. Once the foundation is poured on site, it takes approximately two weeks for the panels to go up and create a complete frame for a home.

Unlike some other prefabricated home manufacturers that rely on a catalog of model homes, Cosmic’s system allows for customization because it can build panels in various sizes with distinct features.

“It offers us extreme flexibility on footprint and layout,” Nash said.

So, for example, if a client requests a 2,500-square-foot home with three bedrooms, each with a window in the same place, the machine can be programmed to execute that custom design. The difference from a stick-built is less about the end result than it is in timeliness, cost and efficiency, according to Nash.

“Clients only have to deal with us,” he said. “It’s just less of a headache.”

For example, because Cosmic does everything in-house, the firm can “design to a budget.” So, while pricing is variable depending on client requests, it’s easier to accommodate both budget and design, Nash explained.

Cosmic rebuild projects in Los Angeles have been coming in at about $600 to $700 per square foot. In other words, a 2,000-square-foot Cosmic home costs between roughly $1.2 million and $1.4 million.

Residents looking to rebuild in the Palisades have cited quotes from builders ranging from $650 to $850 per square foot, according to Pali Builds, a resident-run database. The organization is currently working to collect more data from residents about what builders are quoting them to rebuild code-compliant homes.

Cosmic's entrance into the Los Angeles rebuild marks the first time the company, which has until now focused on accessory dwelling unit projects, is entering the single-family home market. Already, though, they have more than 40 rebuild projects in the works in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades.

“Even though we’re a new company, we’re not new to this as a team,” Nash said.

Cosmic was less than a year old when the fires started. The firm launched last year in response to what the founders, Nash and Sasha Jokic, say are some of the biggest issues facing the industry. This includes the overall housing crisis driven by inefficiency and unaffordability, as well as the requirement to incorporate sustainable building practices.

The firm is based in San Francisco and has completed two accessory-dwelling units so far. One of those now sits on a client’s lot in the Palisades, serving as a makeshift headquarters for the rebuild efforts. Nash said his team is wrapping up another ADU project in the Bay Area and broke ground on Tuesday on their first single-family home, a rebuild from an earlier fire in Sonoma County.

In Los Angeles, it is expected to break ground soon on its first project in Altadena, but the timeline depends on the permit review. Nash said that most of the Los Angeles projects are still in the design phase, working their way through to the permitting submission phase.

Furthermore, all Cosmic homes will be constructed with Class A fire-rated materials, the most fire-resistant materials available.

“That’s everything, the whole house design: Not having overhanging roof eaves, no exposed vents to the entire exterior envelope being Class A-rated materials, so façade, trim, windows, roof, decking, are all Class A,” Nash said.

Another challenge that arises with prefabricated homes is obtaining insurance.

Already, Californians are facing a home insurance crisis that’s been exacerbated by the fires. But Nash says his firm’s homes aren’t different from stick-built when it comes to coverage in the sense that they don’t require special maintenance.

“The insurance company understands what we’re doing,” he said. “Our homes can be worked on like any other homes."

Between Jan. 7 and Jan. 31, the Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed a collective 40,000 square acres across the Los Angeles area.

In their paths, the blazes destroyed an estimated $30 billion of real estate, with the brunt of that damage concentrated among single-family residences in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

As of the end of August, debris cleanup, spearheaded by the Army Corps of Engineers, had been completed, with all privately owned lots that opted in to the service cleared. It took about seven months, much faster than the anticipated timeline.

Even so, 10 months on, “it’s still early days,” according to Nash.

Rebuilding the Palisades and Altadena was always going to be a challenge — especially because Cosmic has had to seek out clients rather than targeting a pool of people already interested in building a new residence.

“You’re dealing with a client base that didn’t make a decision on wanting to build something,” Nash said. “They’re forced into having to go through this recovery while still having a normal life and jobs and kids and trying to manage something that’s very complex.”

At the same time, there has been concern among survivors of both fires that, in the process of rebuilding, their communities will lose the character that once defined them. Before January, both neighborhoods were known for their distinct personas — among residents and residences alike.

Kambiz Kamdar, a fourth-generation Palisadian and developer, first heard of Cosmic when one of his friends expressed interest in working with the firm to rebuild the home he had lost in the Palisades Fire. While Kamdar, a husband and father to three, did not lose his house in the Highlands section of the neighborhood, he has been helping friends and neighbors through the rebuilding process.

“Initially, there was a lot of concern of like, oh, there’s going to be these prefab homes, these modular homes, all the homes are going to look the same,” Kamdar told Homes.com in an interview.

Cosmic, however, argues that those concerns aren’t valid for its work.

“There’s a huge variety of ways that you can customize the shape and interior of the home,” Newmark explained.

After joining his friend for a consultation call with Cosmic’s team, Kamdar came to a similar conclusion. He realized the solution to his neighborhood’s crisis could be found in innovation.

“We do things tried and true, and we’re used to certain ways,” he explained. “I saw this as a solution that’s…like the first step of kind of modernizing construction.”

Soon after, Kamdar joined the Cosmic team as the brand’s general contractor, tasked with overseeing each rebuild.

As it prepares to break ground in Los Angeles, the Cosmic team is the latest to have their hand in rebuilding parts of the city that were once the epitome of Los Angeles living.

On Livorno Drive, tightly packed houses lined the sidewalk, including some in modern designs, some Spanish, and some brand new, while others were stalwarts of the street. Some featured inviting cerulean pools, while others boasted lush green yards. Palm trees dotted the lots, and from the right spot, Pacific Ocean views peeked between fronds and leafy branches.

To drive down Livorno Drive today is a test of the imagination.

The sky is still blue. The ocean view is even better. But after the fires, most of the homes and greenery are gone. Where there was once a thriving pocket of neighbors, there’s not much more now than orangey brown dirt, rusted fences, basketball hoops and empty pools.

But where some see loss and destruction, Cosmic sees opportunity.

"It’s not about the homes. That’s not what made the Palisades — it’s the people," Kamdar said. "So whatever home they want to build back, whatever they want to do, it doesn’t matter. As long as they come back, that’s all that matters.”