LA’s famous ‘Hobbit Houses’ have a new owner. He calls himself the ‘King of Storybook’

In the architectural age of minimalism and millennial gray, a wild and whimsical antidote made of old pavers and jumbled clapboards stands on a quiet street on the edge of LA and Culver City.

Formally, the enchanting property is called the Lawrence and Martha Joseph Residence and Apartments, named after the Disney artist and his wife who obsessively spent three decades building it. But the locals call them the Hobbit Houses – fitting, as they look straight out of a JRR Tolkien novel.

The complex looks comically out of place in Culver City’s Venice Boulevard commercial corridor. It is surrounded by modern apartment buildings, square and inoffensive, built to suit today’s tastes.

Amid that urban haze, the Hobbit houses beg for your attention.

An electric lamppost flickers, simulating fire. The tree in the front yard has a face, with eyes and a nose. The houses are filled with quirky stained glass windows, uneven corners and mounds of wooden shingles, resembling a thatched roof.

This year the building hit the market for the first time. Offers poured in and it was sold to perhaps the most suitable buyer outside Bilbo Baggins himself: a real estate agent Michael Libow.

At $1.88 million, Libow did not 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 Housea medieval-looking masterpiece more suited to 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 an addition to my own home,” Libow said. “It’s a little oasis in a city that is overdeveloped.”

Now that he owns both, Libow has ironically declared himself the “King of Storybook” and said he plans to protect the property and be a spokesman for the style.

“This is my legacy: to bring a little joy to as many people as possible,” he said. “It’s about conservation, 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 sets and centuries-old European houses, architects designed playful houses with turrets and facades on the outside and nooks and crannies on the inside. When done right, the finished product looks like it came out of a fairy tale.

Disney artist Lawrence Joseph built the Hobbit Houses from 1946 to 1970. Over the years, the property developed its own story. He rented out spare units to Hollywood tenants like 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 Sinatra paid, $240,000, in one of the units).

Lawrence died in 1991 and his wife, Martha, went to work protecting the property. It obtained monument status in 1996 and donated an easement to the Los Angeles Conservatoryso that it cannot be rebuilt or demolished.

The property, which consists of nine units across four buildings, needed some work when he bought it, so Libow and his property manager, Ben Stine, have been playing a developer’s version of “Minesweeper” for the past few months, trying to make small improvements for the tenants — electrical work, a tankless water heater — without disrupting anything protected by the LA Conservancy’s easement.

The Hobbit Houses came up 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 had carved himself. Even the wallpaper cannot be touched.

“Protections within a structure are very unusual. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Libow said.

For tenants, this means that a large part of the furniture is included in the rent. The last vacant unit – a double bedroom, one bathroom and a study – contains bar stools and a rocking chair that Lawrence carved.

The house is wrapped in clinker brick, a term for when bricks are placed too close to the flames when fired in a kiln, giving them distorted shapes and colors. Such stones were sometimes discarded in older architectural eras, but today they are prized for the unique look they give to buildings, and completely natural to Culver City’s Middle Earth architecture.

Inside, Lawrence’s sailing background comes to the fore with nautical-themed interiors. A ship’s wheel serves as a chandelier and hangs above vertical plank floors that lead to a galley-style kitchen with a circular bar.

“The idea behind Storybook is to have something imaginative and whimsical, involving movement rather than straight-line rooms,” said Libow. “There is hardly a right angle on the entire site. Everything is amorphous in shape.”

There are no buttons to be found; open doors with hidden latches and levers. A built-in fold-down desk pops out in the living room. In the master bedroom, a “cat flap” slides open to provide easy access to cats hanging around.

The nine units range from 200 square meters to 1,200 square meters. The vacant unit, which spans about 1,000 square feet, hit the market a few months ago for $4,500 per month.

It’s a high price for the neighborhood — most two-bedroom apartments in the area fall around the $3,000 mark — but interested renters still flocked.

“These are not the typical tenants who need four walls and a sink. We have a lot of people in the creative industries,” says Libow. “You rent a lifestyle here.”

Libow said the Hobbit Houses, like his own home, which serves as a regular stop for Hollywood tour buses, are a regular rest stop for people walking through the neighborhood.

“Construction workers will walk by during their lunch to look at the turtles in the pond. It’s a break from reality, even if just for a minute,” he said.

Libow and his property manager spend a lot of time on the property, looking for projects or small improvements that they can implement in the context of nature conservation. But for Libow, who bought it as both a collector’s item and an investment, it’s a labor of love.

“It’s not the most functional architectural style, but it’s the coolest,” he said. “It’s weird, but I’m weird myself. I connect with weird.”