This is what happened with me as I started to research a story on Long Beach’s most unusual homes. I had heard about this particular place that “Looks like a gingerbread house”, was the way someone in my office described it. I knew I had to see it for myself, so I headed down to the address…and sure enough, there it was. A few dollops of icing and some gumdrop accents would not have looked out of place. And in the days that followed, I began to spot one after another after another – interesting homes in this style in my own neighborhood, that I have driven by countless times without even noticing.

While I am immensely interested in architecture, I haven’t studied it, and so found myself at a loss for words when trying to describe the style. Were they mini-castles? Could I say it looked like somewhere a hobbit from a J.R.R. Tolkien tale would live? All I could say was that I was sure I had seen something remarkably similar in a fairytale picture book from my childhood. Long Beach architect Michael Kollin, of Kollin Altomare Architects, later told me that I wasn’t too far off. His firm specializes in contemporary designs, and so he would have to do a little digging into the history of this particular style, when I gave him the addresses of two such homes.

“Even I didn’t know what that particular type of architecture was,” he said. “I was surprised with the little bit of research that I did that this is really more of a late 1800s, early 1900s style that is mimicked after English medieval style. These two homes have a seawave roof with rolled eaves, and their style is called ‘storybook architecture.’”

Michael directed me to a web site that is a great resource for the history of storybook houses (storybookers.com). The site dedicates considerable space to trying to define what exactly storybook architecture is. From the site:

“It seems a precise definition may not be possible, or even desirable— for, as Arrol Gellner wrote in Storybook Style: America’s Whimsical Homes of the Twenties, ‘attempting to classify them as such based upon this detail or that misses their real essence, which owes more to inventiveness than authenticity.’”

Is there such a thing as authentic storybook design when the tales that inspired the houses are fictional works? As representations of the homes in those picture books, Long Beach’s own storybooks certainly look the part. Michael Kollin explained his take on the essence of the storybook house.

“They try to appear larger than they are by having the roofs so big, yet part of their charm is that they’re generally smaller homes with a lot of greenery and shrubbery,” he said. “I think if you’re standing in front of one of these homes just looking at it, you can be somewhat captivated by the mood or the place that home might put you in. It does evoke a sense of our childhood.”

Another of Long Beach’s unusual homes also reminds me of something out of my younger days – back to when I was playing with dolls and their special own Victorian dollhouse. A house that almost everyone knows about or has seen, located in Belmont Heights, looks like a life-scale version of a dollhouse, but with a very unusual roof. Michael told me a bit about this one.

“The façade itself is more of a Victorian Queen Anne, but even the roof goes over and above. I think probably the owner, or whomever designed it, wanted something different,” he explained. “It’s interesting that it’s all composite shingle roofing of multiple colors, red, green, blue, grey, and the detail work is very interesting. I don’t particularly think that that roof has a design style, but it might have been mimicked after something more ornate.”

The roof of each of these homes is such an interesting surprise in the sea of terra cotta tiles of our city’s ubiquitous Spanish bungalows...but it does lead one to ponder who builds such homes, with their timeconsuming detail? Kollin wondered this as well.

“I can’t see that there’s someone who specializes in this, especially not in our community,” Kollin said. “But there has to be people out there who can do this. In all of these homes, it looks like most of the detail work is all in the roofing anyway. The exteriors are all very simple, clean, (and) probably don’t require a lot of maintenance. But those roofs, boy, the labor involved is just tremendous.”

I would love to know the stories of the people who built them, and the people who live in them – because from the outside, at least, they seem to be the sort of people who believe that the only limit in architecture (and maybe in other things too), is your own imagination. Had I the chance, I’d thank them for being a source of inspiration, and for helping me look at the city around me a bit more closely. To notice, and to wonder.