Notes on Home
Examining loss, liberation, and what endures after the fire
Seven days after the new year, I learned that my childhood home—where my mother still lived—had burned to the ground in the Palisades Fire. A lifelong fear made manifest, and also something I’d come to expect, on some strange level. Malibu’s Las Flores Canyon, where I grew up, is touched in equal measure by beauty and danger. Those who call it home are accustomed to its volatility. Wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes. Fallen boulders, floods. I’ve come across a picked-clean deer carcass just yards from our house, have confronted a mountain lion on our doorstep, have swum alongside a baby rattlesnake in the pool. I’ve woken in the early morning hours to a sickening burnt-toast smell—our neighbor’s house engulfed in flames, sparks shooting towards ours in the hot dry wind. It was never a question of whether, but when that canyon home—with its high vaulted-wood ceilings, its curved archways, its sweeping views of the mountains and ocean—would burn. Living there—which I did as a child, and again in my early twenties after my father’s death, and again in my early thirties at the height of the pandemic—I was reminded daily of my own mortality, of our human fragility in the face of nature’s will. And yet it was, is, the place where I’ve felt safest in my life. My home.
In the wake of the January 2025 wildfires, still reeling with both my own and our city’s collective grief, I had a moving conversation with the author Pico Iyer, whose new memoir Aflame explores the solace he found in stillness after losing his own childhood home in 1990’s Painted Cave Fire, then the worst in California history. Iyer recounted the surprising liberation he ultimately found in being suddenly divested of all his worldly possessions, including years’ worth of writing. Home, he said, is not where you live, but what lives inside of you. I held this concept close, wrote it down on a Post-It note that I stuck to my fridge, repeated it to myself at night to stave off the images that churned through my mind: an endless, haunting catalog of precious mementos and family heirlooms, gone.
What would I have taken, if I could have? There was my dead father’s Leica, his mahogany rolltop desk. The few clothes of his we’d kept—his tuxedo, his waxed Belstaff motorcycle jacket, his navy blue blazer with the gold buttons. My grandmother’s china: I’d insisted upon using it on Christmas, the last holiday we would spend in that house. Every painting, every drawing I’d ever made. My film negatives. Decades’ worth of journals—my mother had started writing down my stories before I could hold a pen. All those photographs. My childhood, my family history, everything my mother owned—all of it erased in minutes.
Fire is capricious; so is wind. When my mother and I went back to visit our property a few weeks later, it was baffling to see the wooden fence still standing, the lower deck and swimming pool untouched. We waded through the rubble of our home in hazmat suits. I recovered a few broken shards of a hand-painted porcelain lamp, the Hessian soldier andirons that had once lived in our fireplace. A hardened puddle of melted silver. My mother’s bathtub looked flung haphazardly amidst the wreckage, and there were the cobalt tiles that had lined her bathroom walls—those were what got me, the cobalt tiles. I had loved them.
The concept of “home” is complex and manilayered—especially in this moment, its weight deepened by the wildfires. As so many Los Angeles residents mourn the loss of the structures, objects, and neighborhoods that once held us and our histories, we find ourselves compelled to examine what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and why. What does home mean? This is the central question behind Home, a group exhibition co-curated by myself and Kalon co-founder Michaele Simmering. Spanning painting, photography, and furniture design—and made up entirely of works by artists and designers featured in the inaugural issue of The Panafold, the new print magazine I edit, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the spaces we inhabit, both physical and metaphysical, and the essence of belonging.
“Packing my go bag as I evacuated was deeply and unexpectedly traumatizing,” Michaele told me, as we put together the show. “It was also incredibly disorienting. Our lives are often boiled down to objects and the memories they carry.” This sentiment rings true in Ray and Shards, Elaine Didyk’s intimate, highly detailed oil paintings of her Crestwood Hills living room—and the keepsakes within—streaked with orange light from the Palisades Fire. In From One Home to Another, the Paul McCobb Museum’s founder and steward, Yogi Proctor, positions a well-loved midcentury Paul McCobb table from his vast collection alongside meaningful objects placed by others—among these, charred remnants from my childhood home. At its simplest, home is a physical place, but its essence can exist just as profoundly in a person, a state of being. In Jac Martinez’s black-and-white photograph Rising Son, three young brothers embrace in a field, waning sunlight glancing off their bare shoulders, the bond between them palpable.
Over these past few harrowing months, I’ve found myself preoccupied by the ineffable quality that transforms mere space into sanctuary. The immense devastation we’ve undergone as a city has called upon each of us to explore the contours of our own concepts of home, to interrogate the boundaries between self and surrounding, and to reckon with the topography of our inner and outer environments, by turns fragile and resilient.
Since my house burned down, wrote the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Mizuta Masahide, I now have a better view of the rising moon. That’s the order of life: deterioration, regeneration. Death, birth. Wildflowers springing up over the burn scars. Eventually, destruction makes room for creation—often beyond our wildest dreams.
Home is on view in the Kalon showroom through March 19, 2025.
Annabel Graham is the editor-in-chief of The Panafold and the co-curator of Home, a group exhibition exploring the spaces where we find shelter. Her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue, WSJ. Magazine, W, The Paris Review Daily, and others.
