BY MICHAEL WING | July 28, 2023 | The Epoch TImes
Like a piece of the Shire that fell out of a Tolkien novel, Katherine’s hobbit-inspired home emerged from the ruins of an old stone wall once buried in overgrowth in a French forest. Inside and out, an Art Nouveau motif depicts magical Celtic beasts on cob walls. An earthen, living roof, and big green front door complete the fantasy feel.
Hardly up to code, and currently unregistered, this hobbit-hole home is where Katherine and her husband have lived—and comfortably—since 2020. Styled thusly, she was reluctant to divulge her real name to us (she did; Katherine W. is her pen name), and prefers to keep the exact location of their abode fuzzy.
This business of a “Shire home” began on a plot of land she and her husband bought in 2014—just a few acres in Dordogne. Here, one finds many little, walled ruins hidden in forests, which once were small buildings for seasonal workers in a region that had been a vineyard until around World War II.
Starting in 2016, the couple cleared the rubble and prickly bramble growth from said ruins to complete two small outbuildings in 2017 and 2018. Gazing on their handiwork, they mused the possibilities. “I stood there with my husband and friend and I said, ‘That is where I will live,’” Katherine told The Epoch Times. “They both started to laugh. I accepted the challenge.”
They kept it all-natural on purpose by not using equipment to build. The living, reciprocal roof went up in 2017 and 2018, which allowed them to avoid needing a central beam that would be too heavy for them to install by hand. This roof incorporates a waterproof membrane laid overtop straw insulation and was covered in topsoil with several species of plant that love the sun-dappled shade under the tall trees. The effect this had very much lent itself to the look of being a Shire home.