HOBBIT HOUSES SOLD TO WEIRDEST BIDDER?

New owner will preserve Culver City's fantastical break from reality

- By Jack Flemming

MICHAEL LIBOW wasn't the top contender for the Hobbit Houses, above, but his address the Witch's House-sealed it.

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 Los Angeles 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 J.R.R. 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 frontyard 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.

THE FELINE-FRIENDLY home has a "cat door" in a bedroom that slides open to give pets easy access.

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 Storybook 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.