The Conversion of the Beeber Bifocal Factory into a Home

Bernadette Fox’s conversion of the Beeber Bifocal Factory into a home brought her back to architecture as a hands-on, collaborative practice. Instead of beginning with a finished design and ordering new materials, she began with the factory’s contents: bifocal frames, lenses, machinery, and cardboard. The building’s transformation took two years, and its emerging form depended on the materials already there as much as on Fox’s ideas.

From professional frustration to a building of her own

In 1988, Fox met Elgin Branch, a computer animator; they married the following year. Fox wanted to build a house, but she was not interested in the conventional homes their realtor, Judy Toll, tried to show them in Santa Monica and the Palisades. Toll found an abandoned factory in Venice Beach that was being sold for the value of its land. Fox saw the building itself as the opportunity. Branch trusted her judgment, and the couple bought the former Beeber Bifocal Factory.

The purchase came as Fox was working for Richard Meier and Partners on the Getty Center. She was among a small group of young architects responsible for sourcing, importing, and checking the sixteen thousand tons of Italian travertine intended to sheath the museum. The job placed her attention on a narrow part of a large architectural project; she grew indignant at the waste when stone was rejected for minor inconsistencies. Paul Jellinek, an architect and professor at SCI-Arc whom Fox had met after the purchase, understood the factory project as a way for her to reconnect with the part of architecture she valued: making things.

Clearing, sorting, and discovering a design

The factory was a 3,000-square-foot cinder-block box, with eleven-foot ceilings, a clerestory, and a roof made up of skylights. Contractor David Walker arrived on the first Saturday with a crew, expecting to begin construction. Fox had no plans or permits ready. She instead gave them brooms and squeegees, and the group swept the floor and cleaned the windows and skylights. When Walker asked whether he should order a dumpster, Fox refused.

For the following week, she laid the building’s contents across the floor: thousands of bifocal frames, boxes of lenses, bundles of flattened cardboard, and the machines used to cut and polish lenses. Each morning, Walker found her already at work, knitting while standing with yarn coming from her backpack and studying the scattered materials. The pause before a design took shape was part of the process: she looked at what the factory contained before deciding what it could become.

Fox took home a box of wire frames and returned on Monday with them knitted together into a strong, chain-mail-like sheet with glasses embedded in it. She then asked the workers to use clippers and pliers to turn thousands of old frames into screens for interior walls. Materials that might have been treated as factory refuse became part of the house’s structure. The building’s existing stock did not merely decorate a predetermined design; it helped set the terms of what could be made.

A house assembled from the factory’s contents

Other parts of the interior developed through similar acts of reuse. Lenses became tabletops, and machinery parts became table bases. In a back room, Fox found catalogues piled to the ceiling and glued them into solid four-foot cubes. One evening, the group used a chainsaw to cut seats out of the cubes, turning the compressed catalogues into living-room furniture. The objects retained a trace of their former uses while taking on new ones: optical frames became screens, lens-making machinery supported tables, and printed catalogues became seats.

The work also altered the usual division between designer and crew. Walker recalled Fox bringing the workers into the process rather than arriving with a complete set of instructions; the men knitted in chairs outside and listened to ranchera music on the radio. Jellinek sometimes brought students from SCI-Arc to help, offering extra credit for their participation. The conversion was not presented as a polished plan executed by others, but as a developing project in which Fox, Walker, the workers, and visiting students contributed to the making.

Method and architectural significance

Walker described avoiding trips to the hardware store and using only what was on the premises as a game. That constraint gave the project its organizing method: existing materials were not simply saved after a design decision but repeatedly tested for what they could do. The factory’s contents shaped the furniture and partitions, while the practical discoveries made during construction guided the house’s evolution.

Jellinek set Beeber Bifocal against the architectural priorities he saw around him: the growing use of AutoCAD and prefab methods, and the construction of large houses close to the limits of their lots. He regarded Fox’s project as outside that mainstream and likened its craft-centered character to hobo art. His description emphasizes patience and care rather than technological display. The conversion matters in the account of Fox’s work because it records a movement away from inspecting materials selected by others and toward building through direct engagement with what was available. Its defining achievement was not a single grand design announced in advance, but a home assembled as the factory’s discarded contents were reconsidered and made useful again.