LA’s famous ‘Hobbit Houses’ have a new owner

In the architectural age of minimalism and millennial gray, a wild and whimsical antidote made of old clinker bricks and jumbled shingles sits on a quiet street at the edge of LA and Culver City. Formally, the spellbinding property is named the Lawrence and Martha Joseph Residence and Apartments, named after the Disney artist and his wife who obsessively spent three decades building it. But locals call them the Hobbit Houses — fitting, since they look straight out of a JRR Tolkien novel.

The complex looks comically out of place amid Culver City’s commercial corridor along Venice Boulevard. It’s surrounded by modern apartment buildings, boxy and inoffensive, built to blend in with today’s taste. Amid that urban blur, the Hobbit Houses beg for your attention.

An electric lamppost flickers, mimicking fire. The tree in the front yard features a face, with eyes and a nose. The homes are filled with quirky leaded glass windows, uneven angles and heaps of wood shingles, resembling a thatched straw roof. This year, the property hit the market for the first time. Offers poured in, and it sold to perhaps the most fitting possible buyer outside Bilbo Baggins himself: real estate agent Michael Libow.

At $1.88 million, Libow didn’t have the highest bid. His main qualification was that he owns and lives in one of the finest examples of Storyboook style in the region: the Witch’s House, a medieval-looking masterpiece that is more befitting a “Hansel and Gretel” adaptation than the streets of Beverly Hills. The broker, seeing his connection to the style, promoted Libow to the seller, an out-of-state bank trust. The Hobbit Houses were his.

“It’s like a companion piece to my own home,” Libow said. “It’s a little oasis in a city that’s been overdeveloped.” Now that he owns both, Libow has declared himself, tongue-in-cheek, the “King of Storybook,” and said he intends to protect the property and be a spokesperson for the style.

“This is my legacy: bringing a little bit of joy to as many people as I can,” he said. “It’s about preservation, but it’s also about bringing a sense of awe and wonder to the world.”

The Hobbit Houses are one of Southern California’s finest examples of Storybook architecture, a fantasy style that fittingly emerged in LA in the 1920s around the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Inspired by cinema setpieces and centuries-old European cottages, architects designed playful homes with turrets and gables on the outside and nooks and crannies on the inside. When done well, the finished product looks lifted from a fairy tale.

Disney artist Lawrence Joseph built the Hobbit Houses from 1946 to 1970. Over the years, the property developed a lore all its own. He rented out spare units to Hollywood tenants such as actor Nick Nolte and dancer Gwen Verdon, and the place also housed one of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra’s son (authorities found most of the ransom money Sinatra paid, $240,000, in one of the units).

Lawrence died in 1991, and his wife, Martha, got to work protecting the property. She obtained landmark status in 1996 and donated an easement to the Los Angeles Conservancy, ensuring that it can’t be remodeled or torn down. The property, which includes nine units across four buildings, needed some work when he bought it, so Libow and his property manager, Ben Stine, have spent the last few months playing a developer’s version of “Minesweeper,” trying to make small improvements for the tenants — electric work, a tankless water heater — without disrupting anything protected by the LA Conservancy easement.

The Hobbit Houses came with a 15-page report detailing all the things protected on the property: not just the buildings themselves, but also the facade, landscape features and the interiors, including the custom furniture that Lawrence carved himself. Even the wallpaper can’t be touched. “Protections within a structure are very unusual. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Libow said.

Tribune News Service