Summerville's "Hobbit House" Up for Sale
Fairy Tale Ends for Owner and Designer
By Chloe Johnson
Charleston Post and Courier
Saturday, January 23, 2021
A unique Lowcountry home that's been called the "Hobbit House" is on the market, ending years of work by an owner who designed it himself and did most of the construction work, too.
The catch: This 5,761-square-foot home in Summerville's Walnut Farms isn't finished on the inside, leaving the next owner the chance to complete what was once a whimsical plan.
Owner Gary Duncan said he started working on the lot at 430 Barfield Drive in 1996. From the beginning, his vision was singular: a fairytale cottage, but big enough for a crowd, with a thatched roof and a turret. When the Post and Courier wrote about the home 12 years later, the turret had been abandoned after an architectural board dispute, but the thatched roof remained.
Duncan, a transplant from Minneapolis, said it was a continual challenge to find the right craftsmen. The exterior stonework or "nogging," which involved bricks laid in an off-kilter pattern around protruding pieces of stone, was too far a cry for a bricklayer who was used to creating clean, straight lines. Roofers had a hard time laying out the cedar shingles, which needed space to expand when wet.
That left Duncan doing, in his telling, 99 percent of the work, from pouring concrete into the hand-dug foundations to putting a turtle mosaic in the floor of one of the five bathrooms (the house has five bedrooms as well).
While The Post and Courier dubbed the home the "Hobbit House" in its 2008 piece, Duncan said kids in the neighborhood more often called it the "haunted house" or "Harry Potter house." The technical architectural style is 16th-century Elizabethan.
But by 2011, the project's magic started to wear off.
"I didn't really stay on top of it," Duncan said. "I just kind of lost interest and just kind of realized, gee, what am I doing here?"
It's unclear who might buy a house that looks from the outside like it was meant for Middle-earth, but from the inside like it's an unfinished movie set. Duncan's agent, Jeremy Beggs, said he's spent a lot of time talking to other agents about what type of buyer might spring for the property, and is working off the assumption that the next owner will complete the interior and resell it promptly.
The Zillow listing urges that the home is "a blank slate for your dream home in desirable Dorchester county just minutes from Charleston," but also warns: "Home has no electricity and is vacant; enter at your own risk."
There have been some leads but no success yet, and the home's price was cut steeply in October. As of Jan. 10, its listing price on Zillow was $540,000.
One potential buyer who lives on the North Carolina coast was interested in renovating the interior, Beggs said. When the coronavirus pandemic began, the man worried he wouldn't be able to make it to the site frequently enough, because his beach town was requiring quarantine periods for people who traveled back and forth.
"If COVID hadn't happened, I think we would have sold it by now," Beggs said.
Beggs said he may pull the house off the market soon, so it doesn't linger too long without a sale. Duncan didn't seem to be in a rush to sell the property, but he said he's most interested in finding someone who could make the inside of the home match the storybook exterior. And he said he's even willing to help finish the stonework that remains undone, for the right person.
"That's the kind of the work I love to do the best," Duncan said.