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.

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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.