Beverly Hills Fencers Club

To get right to the point, the Beverly Hills fencers were homeless. So when they were foiled in their attempt to hold sword fights in their hometown, they shopped for a new home in an unlikely place: a retail mall. That's the thrust of how the Beverly Hills Fencers' Club ended up in a storefront in West Los Angeles. The 20-year-old club was squeezed out of its longtime headquarters at a Santa Monica Boulevard recreation center earlier this year when its practice space was cut in half.

To get right to the point, the Beverly Hills fencers were homeless. So when they were foiled in their attempt to hold sword fights in their hometown, they shopped for a new home in an unlikely place: a retail mall. That's the thrust of how the Beverly Hills Fencers' Club ended up in a storefront in West Los Angeles. The 20-year-old club was squeezed out of its longtime headquarters at a Santa Monica Boulevard recreation center earlier this year when its practice space was cut in half.

An hour into a recent Los Angeles-to-Munich Lufthansa flight, Boris Kushnir flipped open his laptop and e-mailed the parents of his nine teenage fencing students en route to an international competition in Kiev. "You don't know how excited they were to know I was telling them this from an airplane," said Kushnir, a fencing instructor at the Beverly Hills Fencers' Club. Later, he chatted by e-mail with a friend in Russia and then surfed the website for the fencing competition.