Twenty-Mile residence

The Twenty-Mile residence was Bernadette Fox’s most celebrated early work: a glass-and-steel home on Mulholland Drive whose defining constraint was that its materials be sourced within twenty miles of the site. Built largely without conventional plans, the house made reuse a design principle rather than a visible compromise. Its demolition, carried out in a single day after it had taken three years to complete, turned the building into an architectural loss with only a few photographs and incomplete plans to preserve it.

Site and materials principle

After Bernadette Fox and Elgin Branch moved into the Beeber Bifocal House in 1991, Fox wanted another project. Realtor Judy Toll found her a scrubby parcel on Mulholland Drive near Runyon Canyon, with a level building pad and a view of the city. A neighboring parcel was also for sale, but Fox and Branch could not afford both. Fox committed to a house made from materials sourced within a twenty-mile radius. The restriction was not satisfied merely by purchasing an item nearby: steel sold at a nearby Home Depot but manufactured in China, for example, would not meet the principle.

The permitted design was a three-bedroom, roughly four-thousand-square-foot glass-and-steel box, with a detached garage and guesthouse. The local sourcing rule shaped the building process at the scale of individual materials. A cement factory in Gardena supplied sand, which Fox mixed on-site. A recycling yard in Glendale contacted her when steel beams arrived. Materials recovered from a dump were acceptable even if their original sources lay outside the radius. A house being demolished down the street supplied a useful dumpster of salvage, while tree trimmers provided wood for cabinets, flooring, and furniture. The constraint thus joined geography to reuse: what mattered was not only what a material was, but how it could be obtained and put back to work near the building site.

Construction and architectural character

After securing a building permit, Fox began construction with David Walker, who could work without a full set of plans. Paul Jellinek regarded Walker’s practical partnership as crucial: Fox could describe what she wanted on-site, and Walker could translate the request into work the crew could carry out. The arrangement also placed the young Fox in a demanding position. She was thirty and building a house without conventional plans in a profession where age and experience carried authority; Walker’s presence helped make the undertaking possible.

The construction relied on direct, adaptable collaboration. When welding was needed, Walker brought in a worker, Fox explained the desired result, and the worker answered through the practical demands of the job. Fox accepted the occasional disrespect of subcontractors rather than let it stop the work. Visitor Ellie Saito remembered finding Fox on-site in overalls and a tool belt, laughing and speaking broken Spanish with workers; Saito rolled up her sleeves and helped dig a trench. The scene conveys the project’s hands-on character without reducing it to improvisation alone: Fox also proved unusually capable with permits, and the building’s unconventional process culminated in a formally approved house.

Inside, the residence answered expectations of green architecture with beauty rather than austerity. Jellinek recalled a sparkling glass box with clean lines and no drywall or paint. Concrete formed the floors; wood covered the walls and ceiling; the counters were exposed aggregate in which pieces of broken glass supplied translucent color. Despite the warmth of those materials, the interior seemed lighter than the outdoors. The house’s environmental premise was therefore legible in its actual construction, but its appearance resisted the assumption that reclaimed or locally sourced building must look makeshift. When visitors from the MacArthur Foundation toured it, they laughed at the contrast between their apparent expectation of an ugly experimental structure and the house’s clarity and finish. They later took off their jackets and helped Fox pour concrete and raise tilt-up garage walls.

Neighboring property and destruction

The parcel next to the Twenty-Mile residence was eventually acquired by Nigel Mills-Murray, an English television magnate, who commissioned a fourteen-thousand-square-foot Tudor-style white-marble mansion that Fox called the White Castle. The crews’ relationship began cordially: Fox borrowed an electrician from the neighboring project, and she persuaded an inspector not to revoke its grading permit. The neighboring driveway later became a point of conflict. During a party at the White Castle, Fox arranged for tow trucks to remove twenty cars parked on the shared access. When Mills-Murray confronted her, she produced the property title, which specified the driveway’s use for ingress and egress rather than parking.

In April 1992, Fox received a call telling her she had been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, then a five-hundred-thousand-dollar grant that had not previously gone to an architect. The recognition helped her put the residence on the market. Jellinek later connected the award to the house’s distinctive point of view: in his account, Fox’s central architectural principle was to waste nothing. Yet the house’s new status as a recognized work did not protect it. Jellinek, unaware of the sale, arrived with students after Fox had gone to Europe and found the gate open and three bulldozers breaking the walls, glass, beams, furniture, lights, windows, and cabinets. He could not stop the demolition; his students formed a line in front of the machines while he drove to a pay phone to reach Fox. The buyer was Mills-Murray, the neighbor whose dispute with Fox had already become part of the property’s history.

The residence had taken three years to complete and was demolished in a day. Its surviving record is strikingly thin: the only photographs identified in the account are the point-and-shoot pictures taken by Judy Toll, and the only plans are the comically incomplete drawings Fox submitted to the building department. The loss therefore involved more than the destruction of a structure. Its unusual construction had not been fully captured in conventional documents, so the disappearance of the building also narrowed what later viewers could know about how it had been made.

Memory and proposed reconstruction

The house remained a source of distress for Fox long after its destruction. She described carrying shame over her behavior during the final year in Los Angeles and returning repeatedly to the house as a measure of personal failure. Its demolition became inseparable in her mind from the feud with Mills-Murray: she questioned whether her own actions justified losing three years of work, while resenting that he could continue creating and she remained psychologically shattered. Even later honors and professional attention could intensify rather than resolve that sense of failure. Her outward performance of nonchalance about the old house concealed an enduring preoccupation with it.

The building’s afterlife also became public and architectural. On the twentieth anniversary of the residence, Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation invited architects, students, and builders to propose a new version of the house and use the challenge to consider what green building should mean in the next twenty years. The competition brief specified a three-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot single-family residence at 6528 Mulholland Drive; its sole material restriction repeated Fox’s original rule that every material come from within twenty miles of the site. A winner was to be announced at a Green Builders of America and American Institute of Architects gala at the Getty Center, with a $40,000 prize.

The proposed rebuilding could not restore the original building or recover its missing plans. Instead, it made the house’s governing idea portable: the twenty-mile rule could be carried forward even when the original glass, wood, concrete, and salvaged components were gone. The Twenty-Mile residence thus persists in two unequal forms—as a vanished physical work with scant documentation, and as a principle repeatedly reconsidered through memory, architectural debate, and the possibility of rebuilding.