Film editor and portrait artist Asher Bingham’s Instagram inbox was out of control after she offered to draw houses lost in the fires that ravaged two Los Angeles neighborhoods in January. Receiving submissions at a rate of 50 to 100 a day, she quickly sought outside support and today has a team—”held together by duct tape”—of 23 volunteers composed of professional artists, good samaritans, and family friends from all over the country. They maintain the waitlist, respond to incoming inquiries, or draw homes alongside Bingham. The Atwater Village–based artist says she’s determined to get to the more than 1,300 submissions still in the queue, no matter how long it takes. “On a good day, where I can just sit down and focus and ignore the world, I can finish ten to fifteen,” she says of the project, which has all but taken over her life. “How much time one takes depends on the complexity of the house and garden—windows and little leaves take forever—and whether or not they have a usable photo.”

“It all started when a dear friend lost her home in the Eaton Fire while she was in Vegas getting married,” Bingham says. “I didn’t know how to say sorry appropriately, so I drew their home and gave it to them as a little memento.” (Bingham drove into the fire-threatened neighborhood with her two young children in tow to rescue the bride’s stranded cats, but still felt compelled to do more.) Encouraged by her friend’s gratitude for the drawing, Bingham posted on Instagram stories, offering to draw other homes that had been reduced to rubble, free of charge. “I thought I’d get ten, maybe twenty requests,” she said. “I had no idea what I was getting into, but I was happy to have something meaningful to do.”

Though she wasn’t extensively experienced at drawing homes, Bingham’s whimsical line-drawn style and her keen eye for expressive, eclectic details naturally lent themselves to architecture. Rather than schematically accurate designs, Bingham’s renderings are full of the personality and character she’s used to capturing in portraiture. Considering their charm and intimate sensibility, it’s unsurprising that the submissions came flooding in soon after posting. “Her drawings are so sweet,” shares Cindy Lopez, whose 1920s Altadena bungalow was amongst the first batch of illustrations Bingham finished. “My house was so special; my friends would say it was like another character in our group, and Asher was really able to capture that here.”

For Bingham, preserving the little ways owners transform their houses into homes—from filling the trees with wind chimes or arranging Adirondack chairs on their patios—is the most fulfilling aspect of the work. “You can really tell the things that people cared for; they have something of the essence of the owner about them,” she says. In Lopez’s case, that meant including the ceramic pot full of plastic flamingos, the front gate’s wrought iron heart design, and the flourishing, newly planted rose bushes.

When they don’t have photos to share, which, considering the duress under which many people left, is frequently the case, Bingham starts with Google Street View. Going back through the years to find the least distorted angles or a time before the hedges grew tall enough to obscure the front door, she often reconstructs homes from multiple images like jigsaw puzzles in Adobe Lightroom. If, after considerable online research, she still can’t find any photographic evidence of the structure, she’ll offer to draw a room instead. “I’ve drawn the flower-filled balcony where a couple had dinner every night, several Christmas trees, and many living rooms with fireplaces that are so often the only thing left standing when people return to the site,” Bingham says. She also references Street View when trying to capture a particularly striking detail, like the exact curve of an archway or the intricate patterning on a wooden screen. “I spend too much time perfecting certain things,” she says of the illustrations, which can take 45 minutes to two hours. “But it’s so worth it; I really do love the unique design of every one of them.”

Thanks to the stunning diversity of L.A.’s residential architecture, it’s not merely euphemistic to say that no two homes are the same. Dana Cuff, architecture theorist, professor, and founding director of cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles, says Bingham’s illustrations include prewar bungalows, Spanish Colonials, Pueblo style, Craftsman style, and the large suburban houses with three-car garages popular in the 1990s. 

“Each individual house really benefits from being part of the whole mixture of all the different houses,” she says of the city’s architectural landscape. “What people fear is that this incredible array of styles will be replaced by conventional developer houses that have the look of one historical period (now), one kind of construction economics, one idea about contemporary lifestyle.”

For Cuff, it’s Bingham’s documentation of the inimitable everyday adjustments to architecture—like adding a front porch or retrofitting a window with stained glass—that makes the illustrations so valuable; her attention to the signs of life that give them a “feel of a loved and lived-in neighborhood.”

When asked how she manages the emotional toll of working with people so soon after a trauma, Bingham says the process has primarily been healing. When she does get overwhelmed, she’ll read through the messages she’s received, which she screenshots and saves in a folder on her desktop. Some make her smile just for their specificity, like the person who says he saw the sketch and “cried like a boy who got shot down during the eighth-grade dance.” Others bring on tears, like the man whose only photos were of his house under renovation with tarps and dumpsters blocking the front and shingles missing from the roof. When he received Bingham’s illustration, which reimagined the house without the eye sore of construction, he shared that he’d been busy mourning what the house could have been but that her drawing made him and his family appreciate what they’d already had.

According to Bingham, the most common response is that the illustration will serve as a “cherished memento” to be treasured forever: the first piece they’ll hang in their home when they rebuild or find a new one. This is true for Lopez, who has already had the image professionally framed and installed in her temporary Highland Park digs. “It will come with me to the new (old) house, and I hope Asher will come by one day, too; I feel she’s on this journey along with me.”

Top illustration by Asher Bingham

Related Reading: