Rise From Ashes in Laguna Painful : Rebuilding: Determined effort brings home of two fire victims near completion while most owners still struggle through permit process.

LAGUNA BEACH —  Homeowner Christopher Tower is on the prowl by 7:30 on most weekday mornings as crews work on the custom-designed house that will replace the home he lost last year when a firestorm roared up a canyon and into his Mystic Hills neighborhood.

The 33-year-old accountant says he has a great contractor and that the crews are doing a wonderful job. But that’s his house being built on Pacific Avenue, and Tower wants it to be perfect.

So he spoke out when they forgot to pour a concrete step linking the kitchen and utility room. He raised a protest when carpenters inadvertently framed part of a bedroom wall that was supposed to remain open. “No one,” Tower said, “is as intimate with the project as I am. It’s as if I’m doing this job. I know these plans inside and out.”

Tower’s 2,000-square-foot home is one of dozens now under construction in Mystic Hills, a neighborhood that was decimated by wildfire last Oct. 27. With his new home’s foundation poured and framing nearly completed, Tower and companion Randy Hupp hope to move back into their home on March 31--months before most other homeowners will even clear the complex municipal permit process.

Tower, whom friends describe as a man constantly in motion, complains that the rebuilding process is achingly slow. Last spring, he grudgingly abandoned a pledge to be back in his own home within a year of the fire, which would be by Thursday.

As the home takes shape, Tower and Hupp, 42, are spending more and more time at the site. “Watching it go up is addictive,” Tower said. “It’s been a yearlong process and we’ve lived it every day. But now I’m really comfortable with what we’ve done.”

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One thing they did was agree to let a reporter chronicle major steps of rebuilding the house. They also discovered the need to balance the time-consuming tasks against the demands of their personal and professional lives.

Those demands prompted Tower to change his work habits--he has cut back the time he spends on the job. Hupp, who owns a rehabilitation company, was forced to lay off a third of his employees after the Northridge earthquake destroyed one of the convalescent homes where it provided physical therapy. Causing further stress, Hupp had to start chemotherapy treatment for a recently diagnosed cancer.

Tower, ever the optimist, acknowledged the pressures. “Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder when does it all get to be too much.”

Hupp remains upbeat: “I’m physically and emotionally strong. . . . I’m positive that (the cancer) will be in remission by the end of the year.”

Tower was all smiles as he toured the new home on a recent Saturday morning. Standing in what will be the kitchen when construction is complete, a hole in a wall that will eventually be a window showcases a postcard-perfect view of the Pacific Ocean.

“I’m actually very positive, very happy,” he said. “I know that we’re going to end up with a new house, a better house, the house of our dreams.”

Tower’s hard-charging style has helped speed up his rebuilding project in a neighborhood still marked with scorched slabs, vacant lots and empty dreams. But such progress doesn’t surprise the accountant’s family and friends.

Laguna Beach general contractor Brock Lyster, who is coordinating the building of the house, has dubbed Tower “the grinder.”

“He can be very aggressive,” said Laguna Beach resident Jill Sloan, who has known Tower for four years. “I consider him to be a very good friend, but sometimes, and he knows it, he can be brutal.”

Tower used the force of his personality last Oct. 27 to persuade Sloan to rescue his two cocker spaniels locked in his back yard. When Tower reached Sloan on her car phone, she figured the accountant was overreacting; news reports indicated the fire wasn’t a major threat. But Sloan gathered the dogs and even briefly considered the idea of carting some of Tower’s other belongings to safety.

As Sloan walked out of Tower’s front door to head back down the hill to her own home, all hell broke loose.

“The house across the street was on fire, the house next door was on fire, there was incredibly thick smoke,” Sloan said. Visibility was so poor that she could only drive 10 m.p.h. down Skyline Drive with the headlights on and the windshield wipers going. Flames surrounded her car.

The terror-filled trip to the bottom of Skyline Drive ended as Sloan’s car bumped into the back of a firetruck. Moments later Sloan, who is comptroller at Citation Builders in Tustin, used her car phone to tell Tower that his home had been destroyed.

Fire crews fought throughout the night to contain the blaze, but reality hit hard when a television crew broadcasting from the Mystic Hills neighborhood showed an eerie landscape punctuated by chimneys, water heaters and burned-out automobiles.

“Once the panic subsided,” Tower said, “we called the insurance agent and told him we saw it on TV, burning.”

Tower set the tone for his rebuilding plan at a Bullocks department store in Newport Beach that weekend. With charge card in hand, he promptly replaced his entire wardrobe.

Starting over wasn’t as easy for Hupp, who, friends said, prefers to move at a more deliberate pace. While Tower viewed the fire as a “chance to build a dream house,” Hupp fretted that there wasn’t enough time to plan properly for a new house.

Designing a new home “is something you’d give your eyeteeth for if you had the time,” said Hupp, who has carefully searched for duplicates of his favorite ties, sweaters, suits and accessories.

Their personality difference served the two men well as they assembled a small army of insurance agents, contractors, geologists, bureaucrats, architects and designers. Tower has pressed forward at every turn while Hupp has generally moved more cautiously.

“It’s been interesting to see how different individuals handle the stress,” said Sloan, whose own house wasn’t damaged. She has watched several Laguna Beach fire victims attempt to put their lives back together. “Chris has a higher level of survival skills than just about anyone I know. If anyone comes out of this OK, it will be Chris.”

And the fire hasn’t dulled Tower’s sharp sense of humor.

Asked for directions to the Pacific Avenue home, just days after the fire, Tower responded: “It’s the fifth home, make that lot, on the left.” He later observed that the blaze “has opened up the ocean view considerably, and you now get cellular telephone coverage throughout Laguna Beach.”

Tower and Hupp had little to smile about, though, on the day after the fire when they made their way past curious onlookers, television cameras and police checkpoints to inspect the remains of the home they purchased in 1987 for $289,000.

Hupp picked through the ruins and salvaged a charred page from a Chopin piano score from Tower’s sheet music collection. Tower uncovered the broken remains of an Eskimo carving that he had given Hupp as a birthday present.

Little remained of the 2,000-square-foot home other than the front foyer. A brass light fixture escaped unharmed but the fire consumed art lithographs, a grand piano, an extensive sheet music collection and all of their financial records.

The old house was, at heart, a tract home that Tower and Hupp had renovated and redecorated in recent years. Like most homes in the neighborhood, it enjoyed tremendous views of the Pacific Ocean.

The new house began to take shape several months later on Laguna Beach architect Morris Skenderian’s drawing board. At the outset, however, Skenderian was not sure whether Tower and Hupp could come to agreement on a design.

“Christopher and Randy had two different perspectives,” Skenderian said. “Christopher wanted something more contemporary while Randy wanted the more traditional Mediterranean style. I think what we ended up with is a nice blend.”

Skenderian listened patiently for two hours during an initial meeting last November. After Tower and Hupp described their visions of a dream house, Skenderian rolled up an old blueprint of the house that had been destroyed and gently asked if he could “take the liberty” of providing Hupp and Tower with some new design ideas.

“Most clients are not as involved as Christopher and Randy,” said Skenderian, who is designing homes for about 17 fire victims. “We’ve tried our best to work with all of them, to help them make decisions that they’ve never had to make before.”

One such decision was where to live while their new home was being designed and built. Unlike some who were forced to rent in neighboring cities, Tower and Hupp relocated to a small bungalow on Brooks Street, less than two miles from their Mystic Hills lot.

But the rebuilding process can take a toll of even the most optimistic person.

“It’s been a hellish day,” Tower said on Nov. 5, 1993, after a string of fire-related meetings. “I got a lot accomplished but I didn’t get back to work until 3:30 this afternoon.” Two days later, after another lengthy meeting, Tower complained that “I’m pretty stressed. There’s too much going on.”

More worries were ahead.

Heavy rain in early November created mudslides throughout Laguna Beach, sparking fears of yet another disaster. Homeowners also were stunned to learn that geologists had found evidence of an ancient landslide sitting beneath one part of Mystic Hills. Tower’s lot wasn’t affected by the suspected slide.

“People are still walking around in a daze,” Tower said earlier this year as homeowners began accumulating permits required for rebuilding. “They’re not used to all this confrontation. But the fact is, there is daily confrontation.”

Tower said he relied upon a strong network of family, friends and business associates.

A commercial builder recommended Lyster, a general contractor known for building quality homes in Laguna Beach. A college friend who had worked as an insurance adjuster briefed Tower on insurance company disaster guidelines. A relative of Tower tutored them on how to monitor general contractors and a friend introduced them to Skenderian.

To decipher arcane financial documents generated by his insurance company, Tower turned to his accounting skills: “I don’t know how someone without my background would deal with this.”

Tower turned to his mother and father, a psychologist and psychiatrist, respectively, for help in managing personal relationships.

“They said to pick one or two people to help you . . . that you can’t have dozens of people trying to help out,” Tower said late last year. “We’ve had so many calls from people wanting to help. Last night, we got a card from a friend who was hurt because we hadn’t allowed him to help.”

But Tower also has benefited from a bit of serendipity.

Like most homeowners, Tower had had taken few photographs to document the nearly $100,000 in improvements that were made to the 30-year-old tract home.

The woman who cleaned the house surprised Tower several weeks after the fire by volunteering a packet of recent photographs that she had taken to show her family the beautiful home where she worked.

“She came over very meekly one day and asked if we wanted these pictures,” Tower said. “The way she took them turned out to be as if they were for Architectural Digest.”

The photographs served Tower and Hupp well during meetings with insurance company representatives. “It’s all a memory game,” Tower said. “They want to know everything that was in the house. You have to remember every little nook and cranny . . . did you have Art Deco triple crown molding!or single crown?”

Most of the homes that burned in Mystic Hills were tract houses that had been renovated or expanded over the years. But the fire erased that heritage and those homeowners who decided to rebuild are creating an eclectic blend of modern and traditional homes. Most won’t be dramatically bigger because the lots are relatively small.

“I think it’s really neat,” Skenderian said. “It’s gone from a simple tract development to custom homes that have a lot of different things to look at.”

At least one resident made it clear that the radically different designs aren’t entirely welcome. One morning, the words “ugly house” were scrawled on a sign in front of a distinctive home now going up on Pacific Avenue.

In a bid to avoid that kind of animosity, Tower and Hupp said they carefully negotiated with neighbors, who also were proposing new designs.

One neighbor lodged “a violent complaint” about the new home’s design, arguing that it would wreck his view, Tower said. “I thought there was no way they’d ever approve it with that kind of a protest . . . but I was very pleasantly surprised when they did.”

A year later, Tower and Hupp are awaiting the day when they can move in.

“I think we rose to the occasion,” Hupp said. “Christopher is the kind of person who’ll be able to live with the little mistakes we’ve made. He’s not going to worry about a misplaced window or some slight imperfection.”