Why Every Coastal House Needs a Wind Plan

For the first eighteen months of working in Malibu, we treated coastal wind the way most architects treat coastal wind: as a structural engineering input. The wind load came back from Nous as a number, the framer absorbed it, and we kept designing.

Then we got the field reports back from the Bienveneda rebuilds. A new build, three doors down from one of our projects, had its outdoor fireplace surround peel off in the first winter storm after move-in. The owner sent us photos. The flashing was fine. The fasteners were fine. The problem was the chase had been designed without thinking about how a sustained 50 mph onshore wind interacts with a 14-foot cantilevered roof above it.

That is when we started building what we now call a wind plan into every coastal project. It is one sheet, drawn at the same scale as the site plan. It maps prevailing wind direction in each season, identifies the building's pressure faces, and calls out every cantilever, parapet, and chimney that needs special detailing. It's not in the building department's checklist. It's in ours.

The big lesson: coastal wind does not just want to lift the roof. It wants to find the seams. A vent terminated on a windward face will breathe sideways for the rest of its life. An eave detailed without a continuous drip kerf will pull rain back under itself every time the gust hits. The roof gets the engineering attention. The seams kill the building.

On the Peacock Nest in San Pedro this year, we ran every vent termination to the leeward side of the building. Every one. Some of them are 30 feet of dryer duct. The mechanical engineer was unhappy. The building will dry out faster than any other house on that bluff.

This is the unglamorous part of coastal architecture. It is not on a renderer's mood board. But it is the difference between a home that ages well in the salt air and a home that needs its siding replaced in year six.

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