You, too, can pretend to live like Bilbo Baggins, but in a big city instead of the Shire! A one-bedroom home endearingly dubbed the "Hobbit House" in Culver City recently went on the rental market for $1,695 a month.
This whimsical, Storybook cottage located in downtown Culver City is one of a series of adorable Hobbit holes created by former Walt Disney Studios artist Joseph Lawrence. He redesigned a single-family residence into several units, according to the LA Conservancy. Lawrence would complete construction on his "Hobbit Houses" in 1970, but he would still add finishing touches on them until 1991.
Pacific Shore Property Management posted a Craigslist ad last week for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom Hobbit House located on the second story of a two-story building on Dunn Drive. According to the ad, "This cottage features rustic stone hewn walls, leaded glass windows, and magical looking ponds filled with fish and a family of turtles... A very spacious living room with original details, built in furniture and a 15 foot + ceiling, makes the perfect entertaining space. Off of the living room you will find a rustic galley style kitchen with range and refrigerator and built in dinette set."LA Conservancy noted that Lawrence was also a sailor and incorporated nautical touches in his Hobbit Houses, like "galley kitchens, vertical-grain boat plank flooring, and built-in furniture with hardware made from boat latches."
The homes are so popular that there is even a Yelp page reviewing the site. In case you're wondering, it averaged a four-star rating out of 10 reviews that mostly talked about people visiting the home (but don't worry, just from the outside).
While there are Hobbit-likes homes everywhere in the world, these Storybook cottages were a thing in L.A. in the 1920s. Sadly, many have since been destroyed. The L.A. Times reports that "mock thatched roof and heavy rolled eaves, half-timbering and leaded glass windows, is a classic example of Storybook style, a whimsical type of architecture that emerged in Los Angeles with the burgeoning movie industry in the 1920s."
"Storybook houses are an outgrowth of the blurred line of fantasy and reality that is particular to Los Angeles," Trudi Sandmeier, a preservationist at the Los Angeles Conservancy, told the Times.
[h/t: Curbed LA]
