Straight Gate is the former girls’ school in Queen Anne Hill that Bernadette Fox chose as a home for the Branch family. Its imposing scale and unusual rooms offered the promise of transforming a neglected institution into a distinctive house; its protected status, deteriorating condition, and long domestic use made it instead a record of plans that remained unfinished. By the time Bernadette proposes leaving it, Straight Gate has come to embody both the family’s shared past and the burden of living among dreams that have visibly crumbled.

Setting and Acquisition

During a Seattle house search, Bernadette saw Straight Gate from a hill above downtown. The brick building stood on a large property overlooking Elliott Bay. Built at the turn of the century as a Catholic school for wayward girls, it had been unused for years. Developers had at one point proposed converting it into eight condominiums; because they considered the name Straight Gate antigay, they had renamed the project Gatehouse.

The property appeared to offer remarkable value. The building contained about 12,000 square feet, and the asking price was $400,000, the same as other houses the family had viewed on much smaller lots. Its three acres were mostly flat, while the hillside could not be built on and offered privacy. Bernadette flew to Seattle to look at houses, found Straight Gate, and urged the family to move there. Elgin Branch later recalled that the choice reflected her characteristic enthusiasm: a crumbling former school seemed to her not an obstacle but a place with potential.

Straight Gate was also tied to the losses that preceded the move. Bernadette’s architectural career in Los Angeles had been disrupted after trouble with Twenty Mile House, and she hoped to recover by making a home for Elgin and the child she was expecting. Elgin later remembered that they used Bernadette’s MacArthur Foundation money to buy Straight Gate. In his view, the purchase carried her architectural hopes into a new setting, even as the condition of the house made those hopes difficult to realize.

Architecture and Constraints

The property’s apparent openness concealed strict limits. Its yard had been deeded as open space for tax purposes, and the Queen Anne Neighborhood Association had designated Straight Gate a historic site. The designation prevented changes to the exterior or interior walls, leaving the building in what Elgin described as building-code limbo. Although the area was zoned for single-family residences, permission to use the building as a house did not mean that its protected fabric could readily be altered.

Bernadette nevertheless saw a house within the institution. The basement alone measured 5,000 square feet, leaving 7,000 square feet above ground. Its locked-from-the-outside basement door suggested the former school’s custodial past, while the size offered an unusually large lower level. On the ground floor, a kitchen opened onto a dining room; a broad receiving area could serve as the living room, with small offices nearby. Upstairs, a chapel with stained-glass windows and a row of confessionals suggested, in Bernadette’s proposed arrangement, a master bedroom and closet. Other rooms could become a child’s room and a guest room.

She initially regarded the required work as largely cosmetic: weatherproofing, refinishing, and paint. That vision sat uneasily beside the historic restrictions and the building’s actual condition. Straight Gate was at once spacious enough to invite reinvention and protected in ways that complicated it. The gap between those two facts became central to the family’s experience of the house.

A Home in Decline

The renovation Bernadette had imagined did not take shape. After Bee Branch’s difficult early health and recovery, Bernadette devoted herself to caring for her daughter, while Elgin worked increasingly long hours at Microsoft. He later described the arrangement as one in which Bernadette made decisions and he paid for them. When Bee was old enough for kindergarten, Elgin expected Bernadette to return to architecture or repair the house, but neither happened.

The building’s problems accumulated in concrete stages. Leaks became holes in the roof; cracked windows were covered with cardboard and duct tape. Water entered the floors, and weeds appeared inside. The damage became so extensive that, when Bee was five, she could dig into the damp wooden floor with a spoon during a game of restaurant. The episode made the house’s deterioration part of ordinary childhood life rather than an abstract maintenance problem.

Bernadette also used an Airstream trailer in the backyard as a refuge from the activity inside the house. A crane had lowered it onto the property; she kept her computer there and spent much of her time in it. Bee named it Petit Trianon after Marie Antoinette’s retreat at Versailles. The trailer created a smaller, separate domestic space within the neglected grounds: while Straight Gate’s rooms carried the weight of repair and family life, Bernadette had somewhere on the property to withdraw during the day.

Memory, Neglect, and Meaning

Years later, Elgin recognized that the family had adjusted to Straight Gate’s failing condition. He explained that people become accustomed to their surroundings and cease to register their defects; the holes in the ceilings, wet patches in the floors, and rooms closed off to the family had become familiar. Bee answered that this was how they had lived. Their exchange does not erase the difference between a damaged building and a livable home. Instead, it shows how the same place could be recognized as unacceptable by one family member and remembered as the setting of their shared life by another.

For Elgin, the house also made Bernadette’s stalled creativity visible. He told Bee that he had not understood how to help an artist who had stopped creating, and remembered the family’s use of Bernadette’s MacArthur money to purchase the building. Its deterioration seemed to him inseparable from the collapse of her hopes. Yet the family’s years there had included routines, refuge, and Bee’s childhood; the house was not reducible to its failed renovation. Straight Gate’s force in the story comes from holding these meanings together: an architectural project, an imperfect home, and a structure whose neglect the family learned to treat as normal.

Proposed Departure

Bernadette eventually announced that the family would leave Straight Gate, describing the place as a prolonged bad dream from which all three of them could wake. She connected the plan to Galer Street School, where Bee had been well cared for and had flourished. After a caller involved in fundraising for a new campus approached her, Bernadette proposed giving Straight Gate to the school or selling it for a dollar. Her stated aim was to help the school obtain a campus while allowing the family to begin living differently.

The proposal marks a change in Bernadette’s relation to the building. Straight Gate had first seemed an opportunity to resume a creative life and make a home; by the end, she speaks of leaving it rather than repairing it. The evidence records this as a plan, not as a completed transfer or departure. Even so, the proposed gift gives the house a possible future beyond the family: the former school might again serve an educational community, while the Branch family would no longer organize its life around the failing residence.