Beeber Bifocal House

Beeber Bifocal House is the former eyeglass factory that Bernadette Fox and Elgin Branch bought and transformed into a home. Its significance lies not only in the conversion of an industrial building, but in the way Fox made the factory’s accumulated materials part of the architecture: old frames became screens, lenses became tabletops, and machinery supplied table bases. The house marked a return to the kind of work she valued—making and building—and later became the first of the architectural “visions” Elgin associated with her creative life.

Origins and Structure

Fox was drawn to the former factory in Venice Beach because of the building itself, not simply the land on which it stood. The decision surprised the real-estate agent who showed it to the couple, and Elgin trusted Fox’s choice. The factory was a three-thousand-square-foot cinder-block structure with eleven-foot ceilings, a clerestory, and a roof made up of skylights. From the outside it appeared unpromising; inside, the windows and overhead glazing made it full of light.

The building still held the equipment and stock of its former use. It contained thousands of bifocal frames, boxes of lenses, flattened cardboard, and machinery for cutting and polishing lenses. Fox did not begin with a finished plan for how these remnants would fit into a house. Instead, she and her collaborators first cleaned the building and then laid its contents out across the floor, treating what remained as the starting material for the design.

A House Made from the Factory

The conversion occupied the next two years of Fox’s life, with contractor David Walker present daily. When he arrived for the first workday, Fox had no plans or permits ready; she had brooms and squeegees, and the crew began by sweeping the floor and cleaning the windows and skylights. She resisted ordering a dumpster. In the following week, she spread the factory’s contents across the floor and studied the materials before settling on how to use them.

The first major transformation began with a box of wire bifocal frames. Fox took them home at the end of one week and returned with the frames knitted together into a strong, chain-mail-like sheet, with the glasses still embedded in it. The crew then used clippers and pliers to turn thousands of old frames into screens that served as interior walls. The discarded contents were not merely displayed as reminders of the factory; they were reworked into the divisions and surfaces of the home.

Other elements developed from the same accumulation of material. Lenses became tabletops, while machinery parts became table bases. A back room held catalogues piled to the ceiling; Fox glued them into solid four-foot cubes, which were later cut into seats with a chain saw. The design evolved through successive discoveries rather than from a single overarching scheme. Paul Jellinek, an architect and professor who knew Fox, described the house as beginning with the knitted frames and then growing to include the tables and furniture.

Method and Architectural Meaning

The project’s practical rule became to avoid trips to the hardware store and use what was already on the premises. That restriction made reuse a daily design problem: the factory’s remnants shaped what could be built, while the act of building gave those remnants a new function. Walker recalled the work as a game, and Jellinek saw the process as a return to the part of architecture Fox loved: building things, after professional work at the Getty Center had left her dealing with the rejection of travertine over minor inconsistencies.

The house stood apart from architectural trends that Jellinek associated with technological innovation, AutoCAD, prefabrication, and large houses built close to their lot lines. In contrast, Beeber Bifocal emerged through patient handwork and the reuse of ordinary, already-present materials. Jellinek connected its approach to hobo art and emphasized the care involved in its making. Its materials register the building’s former industrial purpose, but their new arrangement also makes the home legible as the product of Fox’s sustained attention and improvisation.

Home, Recognition, and Memory

Beeber Bifocal was both a collaborative project and a family home. Walker supplied the construction partnership, while Jellinek visited and sometimes brought students who helped with the work. The crew’s participation extended to knitting frames outdoors as they worked; the project’s making was therefore not confined to Fox’s private conception but unfolded through repeated, shared tasks. The house’s domestic character came from that labor as well as from its unconventional furnishings and partitions.

After the house received a major award described as the Genius award, Fox and Elgin celebrated with Judy Toll, the agent who had shown them the factory. Elgin gave Fox a silver locket containing a yellow photograph of a severe-looking girl and connected the gift to Saint Bernadette, who was said to have had eighteen visions. He named Beeber Bifocal Fox’s first vision and the Twenty Mile House her second, framing the house as the beginning of a sequence of creative works. The moment linked architectural achievement to Fox’s personal history and to the couple’s plans to visit Lourdes, the home of Saint Bernadette.

The house also acquired a contested social meaning after the family moved to Seattle. In a confrontation with Fox, Audrey Griffin invoked the family’s move from Los Angeles and their purchase of a large building as evidence, in her view, that they had arrived with money but did not belong in the neighborhood. She contrasted their presence with her family’s longstanding ties to the area. Beeber Bifocal thus carried more than the history of Fox’s design: it could be remembered as a home and creative achievement by the family, while becoming, in a neighbor’s account, a sign of their outsider status. Its later importance rests on that tension as well as on its material reinvention: a factory remade into a home, and a first architectural vision that remained central to the story of Fox’s work and family life.