"The Shire" Hobbit-Themed Condo/Aparment Complex

Modules? Miniatures? Hah. This is the ultimate D&D game accessory: a full-sized Hobbit House you can live in.

The actual thing is pretty cheesy. The landscaping is cramped and cheap-looking; how are you "living with nature" if there's no actual nature around apart from a small artificial pond?

And the buildings' stylings aren't subtle enough.

Still, as artificial and ersatz and fakey as is it all is, I wonder if a less in-your-face, more restrained version of the idea wouldn't be pleasant.

Yes, it's a retreat into make-believe. But then, the idea of driving home from work every day to live in an eighteenth century English Hamlet isn't a terrible one.

Now if they do one of these for Victorian London, I'm all over it.

Thanks to JohnS.

(PS, the guy whose "dreamed" and designed this Hobbit Condo complex also did the terrible music for the video sales brochure.)

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A hobbit hole. You don't live in these. They're there to make you think you live among hobbits or something. In reality, this is where the Shire's several serial killers will store their bodies.

They don't seem to have any pictures of actual finished buildings, though I think one looked semi-finished in the video. At least it had windows.

The video says the fake "thosta" of the roofs is made of a "new age material." Plastic, I guessed. I was right. It's a "new age" method of using recycled pvc.

That kind of takes a bit of the Old World charm out of it.

I Tried To Avoid Being Knee-Jerk... but the more I think about it the knee-jerk first-blush gut-take opinion was right: this is the worst idea, ever.

If you could do something like this halfway right, it might be okay. But you can't do it halfway right, because anyone with enough money to spend on a nicely made "English cottage" isn't going to buy one in Hobbitville, Oregon.

It reminds me of Kaus' description of the PT Cruiser and other stylistically silly cars as "cartoon cars." This is a whole cartoon housing subdivision. It's one thing for someone to drop $25,000 on a PT Cruiser, but it's another thing to spend $250,000 on a cartoon condo.

posted by Ace at 01:09 AM

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