Storybook homes in Los Angeles

What makes it storybook

Storybook houses look like they came out of an illustrated fairy tale, and that's the point. The style takes the cottages and manor houses of old European villages and exaggerates them on purpose. The roof is the giveaway: steep, uneven and often finished in shingles laid in waves or rolled over the edges to look like thatch. Add several gables, sometimes a turret or a dovecote, and a chimney that leans or curves.

Doors and windows are often odd shapes and sizes, set at slightly different heights, with leaded or diamond-paned glass. Walls mix rough, hand-troweled plaster with clinker brick, stone and half-timbering. Inside, the rooms are usually small and full of arched openings, beamed ceilings and built-in nooks. You'll also hear Fairy Tale or Hansel and Gretel style. The name "Storybook" caught on after Arrol Gellner and Douglas Keister published their book Storybook Style in 2001.

How LA got so many

The style took hold in the 1920s and 1930s, and Los Angeles, with its film studios, became its home base. Set designers and studio artists knew how to build a fantasy, and a few of them built houses.

• Harry Oliver, a Hollywood art director, designed the Spadena House in 1921 as offices and dressing rooms for Irvin Willat's studio in Culver City. Now known as the Witch's House, it was later moved to Walden Drive in Beverly Hills, with accounts dating the move from the 1920s to 1934. It's a private home, best seen from the street.
• Oliver also designed the Tam O'Shanter on Los Feliz Boulevard in Atwater Village, opened in 1922 by Lawrence Frank and Walter Van de Kamp. It's still open, and it's the easiest way to see the style from the inside.
• Ben Sherwood built the Snow White Cottages in 1931, a group of eight small storybook units on the 2900 block of Griffith Park Boulevard, where Los Feliz meets Silver Lake. They're often linked to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though that connection has never been proven.
• Lawrence Joseph, an artist who briefly worked at Walt Disney Studios, built the "Hobbit Houses" on Dunn Drive near Culver City between 1946 and 1970, with sweeping shingled roofs, diamond-paned windows and clinker-brick chimneys. They became City of LA Historic-Cultural Monument #624 in 1996, and the LA Conservancy holds a preservation easement on them.

Beyond the famous ones, LA has many smaller storybook houses: small cottages built by local builders who borrowed the look, often on the same streets as Spanish homes of the same years.

Where to find them

• Los Feliz and Silver Lake. Los Feliz and Silver Lake have the Snow White Cottages and storybook houses scattered through their 1920s streets, next to Spanish and Tudor homes.
• Atwater Village. Atwater Village has storybook and Spanish bungalows on flat streets, plus the Tam O'Shanter.
• The canyons. Laurel Canyon has 1920s and 1930s cabins and storybook cottages with wood siding and stone chimneys.
• Beverly Hills. The Witch's House sits on an ordinary residential block in Beverly Hills, among much more conventional houses.
• The Westside. The Hobbit Houses sit on Dunn Drive on the edge of Palms and Culver City, where the Spadena House was first built.

Buying one: what to look for

Original or altered. With this style, most of the value sits in handmade details: rolled roof edges, clinker brick, hand-troweled plaster, wrought iron and leaded glass. They're hard and expensive to recreate. Ask what's original, what's been repaired, and what's been replaced, and look at the permit history. Additions can be tricky, since the charm depends on the small, irregular shape.

Inspection points specific to the style:

• The roof. Rolled-edge and wavy shingle roofs take specialized labor to repair or replace. Ask how old the roof is and what it's made of, and talk to a roofer who has worked on one. Material choices for a replacement can depend on local building and fire codes.
• Plaster and brick. Rough plaster hides cracks well. Wider or growing cracks can point to movement or water, and clinker brick and chimneys deserve a close look.
• Wood. Exposed beams, half-timbering, shutters and doors can rot or attract termites, especially where they meet the ground or the weather.
• Systems. Houses from the 1920s and 30s may have galvanized supply lines, clay or cast iron sewer lines and some knob-and-tube wiring. A sewer camera inspection is a good idea.
• Foundations and earthquakes. Many homes of this era were not originally bolted to their foundations. Ask whether seismic bolting or cripple wall bracing has been done.

Preservation rules. Some storybook houses are individual Historic-Cultural Monuments, like the Hobbit Houses, and some sit inside a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ). Either can mean design review for exterior changes, so check before planning a remodel. City Planning lists the city's historic districts. Beverly Hills, Culver City and other cities run their own programs.

The Mills Act. Owners of some qualifying historic homes may be able to enter a Mills Act contract with their city, which can reduce property taxes in exchange for a commitment to restore and maintain the house. Rules, application windows and limits vary, so treat this as general information. Start with the City of LA's preservation incentives page and verify the details with the city and a tax professional.