Los Angeles Wildfires: Owner Of 'Miracle' Malibu Mansion Shares Why His House Is Intact

Thousands of houses, including those owned by big Hollywood celebrities, were reduced to ashes in the deadly Los Angeles wildfires that have killed at least two dozen people. But a mansion in Malibu, worth around $9 million, still stands firm, leaving its owner stunned.

Owner David Steiner, a retired waste-management executive and father of three children, said he was amazed to see the mansion still standing when the smoke cleared in the area.

“It's a miracle — miracles never cease,” Steiner, 64, who is from Texas, told The New York Post on Friday. The 4,200-square-foot house has four bedrooms. Steiner bought the property from a producer.

He said he thought that he "lost" his three-story building, which was vacant at the time of the wildfire, after a local contractor on Tuesday shared a video with him. The footage showed flames and smoke engulfing the property along with his neighbours'.

“(The contractor) was watching the news reports and saw my neighbour's house going down and told me, ‘It looks like your house is going, too'... It looked like nothing could have possibly survived that, and I thought we had lost the house," Steiner said.

He was later stunned to hear people contacting him to say, "Your house is all over the news".

"I started getting pictures and realised we had made it through... My wife sent me something this morning that said, ‘Last house standing'. And it brought a pretty big smile to my face at a pretty bad time," he shared.

In photographs and videos that went viral, Steiner's home can be seen standing in the middle of whatever remains of the charred neighbourhood properties.

According to Steiner, the property's ultra-sturdy construction, likely designed to protect it from earthquakes, might have saved it from the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed several homes surrounding it.

"It's stucco and stone with a fireproof roof," Steiner said, adding its pilings are "like 50 feet into the bedrock" so that it remains steady whenever the powerful waves crash into the seawall below it.

Steiner said he "never, in a million years, thought a wildfire would jump to the Pacific Coast Highway and start a fire" in the area.

He added the house was built like a cruise ship. "The fireplace chimney looks like the smokestack of a boat... And then, the balcony behind looks like the balcony off a cruise ship. And it feels like a cruise ship because you're right there on the water," he added.