Some homes were still standing. We wanted to know why.

We’ve been building high-performance homes in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains since 2020, often in areas where wildfire is part of life. We’ve been under evacuation orders twice — first from our home during the Marshall Fire in 2021, and more recently from a construction site that also happens to be our future home.

But it was the aftermath of the Marshall Fire that changed the way we looked at wildfire.

Living so close to the affected communities, we saw the devastation up close. Entire neighborhoods had been destroyed, yet here and there, some homes were still standing.

At first, they seemed incredibly lucky. Then we started looking more closely.

The materials mattered. The construction details mattered. The vegetation surrounding the home mattered. We became obsessed with understanding why.

Efficient Build came first — our high-performance residential construction company, building at 8,300 feet in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Building science had already taught us to question every material and assembly we used: How does it affect energy efficiency? Indoor air quality? Durability? Our wildfire obsession added another question: How will it behave in a fire?

Our professional backgrounds shape how we approach those questions too. Hector is an electrical and software engineer, bringing a systems-oriented approach to understanding how things work, interact, and fail. Marcela is a technical content manager, with a background in researching complex technical subjects, digging through documentation, and turning that information into something people can actually use.

Since then, we’ve spent years researching, experimenting, reading specs, digging into the science, and testing things ourselves — and yes, occasionally throwing a piece of building material on the grill just to see what happens.

Along the way, we noticed a gap. There is tremendous expertise in high-performance and green building, but fire performance is too often skipped or treated as an afterthought. We believe these conversations belong together. Sometimes a small change during design can significantly improve wildfire resilience without significantly increasing cost.

The expertise we’ve developed through our Efficient Build projects has led to opportunities to share our knowledge at renowned industry events including the Colorado Building Symposium, Sashco’s Zero Failures, and the NAHB International Builders’ Show.

That obsession — and our desire to share what we’ve learned — became Eldreki.

There is no such thing as a wildfire-proof home. But there are things we can do to give a structure a better chance. We want to help homeowners and construction professionals understand those choices, prioritize what matters, and make informed decisions about wildfire resilience.

If you’d like to get to know us beyond Eldreki, you can follow our construction journey with Efficient Build on YouTube (opens in a new tab) and Instagram (opens in a new tab).