Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety

The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety is the city agency involved in the permitting of Bernadette Fox’s Twenty Mile House. Its role in her story is concrete but limited: it provided the institutional route to a building permit, while the incomplete plans submitted for review later became part of the scant documentary record of a celebrated house that was demolished.

Role in the Twenty Mile House

In Paul Jellinek’s recollection, the department was accessible in a way that allowed a determined architect to speak directly with its senior official. He describes an earlier period, before the building boom and the earthquake, when one could go to the building department and talk to the person at the top. That account situates the department not only as a permitting office but as a place where personal explanation could help translate an unusual design into an approvable project.

The senior official was Ali Fahad. He remembered Bernadette as a charmer who would deal with no one but him. She brought hand-knit blankets and hats for his newborn twins; over tea, she explained what she wanted to build, and he told her how to proceed. The account establishes a direct working relationship, but does not suggest that Fahad bypassed the department’s process or that the agency formally endorsed her design.

Plans, Review, and Construction

Before construction began, Bernadette received a building permit for a three-bedroom, roughly four-thousand-square-foot glass-and-steel house, with a detached garage and guesthouse. The department’s plan-check process was therefore a necessary step between her proposal and the building work. The house’s material system was distinctive: sand came from a cement factory in Gardena, steel beams from a Glendale recycling yard, and wood from tree trimmers, with usable material also salvaged from a nearby demolition dumpster.

Paul later recalled that the plans Bernadette submitted for plan-check consisted of pages of official-looking documentation that contained virtually no information. His description makes the paperwork an ironic counterpart to the finished house: the project was sufficiently documented to obtain a permit, yet the drawings did not offer a complete account of the building’s design. David Walker’s ability to work without conventional plans helped make construction possible, while the department’s permit marked the project’s formal authorization.

Records and Architectural Memory

After the Twenty Mile House was demolished, the surviving record was strikingly thin. The house had taken three years to complete but was destroyed in a day; the only photographs identified in the account were those taken by realtor Judy Toll, and the only plans were the comically incomplete ones Bernadette had submitted to the department. The agency thus appears in the story’s architectural afterlife through the documents associated with permitting, not through any claim that it controlled the house’s preservation or demolition.

The house’s disappearance did not end its public significance. A twentieth-anniversary design challenge invited architects, students, and builders to reimagine it as a three-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot residence at its original Los Angeles address, subject to Bernadette’s restriction that every material come from within twenty miles of the site. In that later act of commemoration, the incomplete plan record underscores the gap between administrative documentation and the fuller architectural work that had captured the imagination of visitors and builders.