The Demolition of Twenty Mile House

The Demolition of Twenty Mile House is the abrupt destruction of Bernadette Fox’s celebrated Los Angeles home, witnessed by her friend Paul Jellinek and a group of his students. Built over three years and remembered for joining environmental restraint to architectural beauty, the house was flattened in a single day. Its loss became both a personal rupture and a public argument about who controls a building’s fate, what survives when it is destroyed, and how architectural reputation can grow around an absence.

Background and Intended Future

The Twenty Mile House had attracted attention as an unusually beautiful example of environmentally minded building. In 1992, before LEED and the Green Building Council, Jellinek brought visitors connected with the MacArthur Foundation to see it. They had expected, he recalled, something like an unattractive yurt assembled from discarded materials. Instead, they encountered a sparkling glass box with clean lines: no drywall or paint, concrete floors, wood walls and ceiling, and exposed-aggregate counters flecked with broken glass. The house’s materials were warm, yet the interior seemed lighter than the world outside. The visitors were so struck by it that, while Fox poured concrete and built the garage’s tilt-up walls, they rolled up their sleeves and helped. The recognition that followed allowed Fox to let the house go and put it on the market.

Its sale did not mean Fox had finished with it. She still needed photographs for her portfolio, and preferred to wait a month so the garden could fill in. Jellinek contacted the buyer to ask whether the delay was acceptable and was told it was. Fox planned to photograph the house after returning from Europe, where she and her companions had decided to visit Lourdes, associated with Saint Bernadette. The planned photographs and the house’s intact garden therefore belonged to an ordinary future that seemed secure: the building had a buyer, but it had not yet vanished from the life and work Fox expected to continue.

Jellinek Discovers the Demolition

In autumn, while Fox was away, Jellinek wanted to show the Twenty Mile House to a new group of students. He knew she was in Europe, but followed his usual practice and left a message saying that he and the class would stop by. He had a key. Turning off Mulholland Drive, he noticed that the gate stood open; only after getting out of his car did he understand what was happening. Three bulldozers were driving into the house, breaking glass, crushing beams, and flattening its furniture, lights, windows, and cabinets. The scale and noise made the scene difficult to comprehend before its meaning became clear: the house was not being prepared for new owners but destroyed.

Jellinek did not know that Fox had sold the property. He ran to one of the bulldozers, pulled its operator off, and shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” The operator did not speak English. With no cell phones available, Jellinek had his students form a chain in front of the machines while he drove to the nearest pay phone on Hollywood Boulevard. He reached Fox’s answering machine and left an angry message: “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. You don’t just go off to Europe and destroy your house!” His accusation arose from what he could see, not from knowledge of the transaction: to him, the destruction appeared to be Fox’s inexplicable decision.

The Hidden Transfer of Ownership

The misunderstanding persisted until Fox returned. Two weeks after the demolition, Jellinek was away from his office when she left a message asking what he meant and saying that she and her companions were back. She then called her realtor, Judy Toll, to ask whether anything was wrong with the house. Toll initially said she did not know whether Nigel had done anything to it. Fox did not recognize the name. When Toll identified Nigel as the English neighbor who hosted a television show in which expensive objects were dropped from a ladder, Fox insisted that a friend of Toll’s named John Sayre had bought the house.

Toll then realized that Fox had not been told who actually owned the property. While Fox was in Europe, the business manager had instructed Toll to transfer the title to Nigel Mills-Murray. Toll had understood that the business manager was buying on behalf of his client, a familiar arrangement for a celebrity seeking privacy. Nigel Mills-Murray, not John Sayre, had been the buyer all along. After Toll explained this, Fox fell silent and hung up. The revelation changes the force of the destruction: Jellinek had believed Fox had knowingly left a house she owned to be demolished, while Fox’s understanding of the buyer—and therefore of who controlled its fate—was mistaken.

Loss, Record, and Afterlife

The Twenty Mile House, three years in the making, was demolished in one day. Its physical destruction was accompanied by the near-erasure of its documentation. The only surviving photographs identified in Jellinek’s account were the snapshots Toll had taken with her point-and-shoot camera; the only plans were the comically incomplete drawings Fox had submitted to the building department. A later account notes that few photographs of the house remained and that Fox was said to have destroyed all its plans. The contrast is stark: the house’s architectural reputation expanded even as the materials that could document it dwindled.

Jellinek resisted treating Fox as the sole innocent party. Although she was widely regarded as the great victim of the loss, he judged that the demolition was nobody’s fault but hers. That verdict sits uneasily beside the concealed transfer that left her unaware of Nigel Mills-Murray’s ownership, and beside Jellinek’s own desperate attempt to stop the bulldozers before he understood what had happened. The book preserves the contradiction rather than resolving it into a simple account of blame. The episode leaves Fox both associated with the house’s destruction and bound to the work that made it valuable.

The loss also became a form of architectural memory. News of the demolition brought an outpouring of grief in architecture circles, while the house’s twentieth anniversary later prompted the Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation to invite architects, students, and builders to design a new version. The brief specified a three-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot home at the original Mulholland Drive site and retained Fox’s defining restriction: every material had to come from within twenty miles of the building site. The winning design was to receive $40,000. This proposed rebuilding could not restore the vanished house; instead, it made the destruction the starting point for a new public conversation about what it means to build green. Its legacy thus survives in two opposed forms: the fragile photographic and documentary record of a lost building, and a renewed challenge organized around the principle that had shaped it.