THORNDIKE, Maine — Drive down a dirt road in the tiny Waldo County town of Thorndike, and suddenly it seems as though you may be on your way to Middle Earth.
Here is the workshop of Wooden Wonders, a small, family-owned business, and where its rounded “hobbit holes” take shape before wending their way to other destinations around the country. The company was started eight years ago by Rocy and Melissa Pillsbury, as a way to combine Rocy Pillsbury’s talent for building homes and the couple’s shared love of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of The Rings” books and movies.
“We didn’t set out intentionally to start a hobbit hole business,” Melissa Pillsbury, 36, said this week. “But it’s what took off for us.”
Over the years, the business has grown and changed, she said. Originally, they built and delivered the hobbit holes to customers around Maine and New England who wanted them for playhouses, garden sheds and chicken coops. But two years ago, they decided to expand their reach and put their resources into a line of hobbit holes that could be shipped as a kit to locations far away from central Maine.
Pillsbury quit her day job at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, and the couple launched themselves into figuring out the tricky logistics of making a fool-proof kit that can be assembled by the recipients and still looks good. They pre-paint them and install the windows, and the finished hobbit holes smell of fresh pine and cedar. They look like places where children could easily spend hours in imaginative play.
“We made the leap,” she said.
The line of hobbit hole kits runs the gamut from $400 doghouses to the $7,995 “Bag End” model playhouse, which is designed to support a sod roof and be placed underground. The family still designs and builds custom hobbit holes, too, and spent all summer building three adult-sized, fully insulated underground cottages for Forest Gully Farms, a new business in Tennessee. The business owners intend to rent them out for overnight accommodations, Pillsbury said, adding that they also built a separate bathroom structure in a storybook cottage style. The hobbit holes are not designed for indoor plumbing, she said.
“One of the unexpected pleasures of being in this business has been the customer experience,” Pillsbury said. “Turns out, the kind of people who want to buy a hobbit hole are incredibly kind, pleasant people to deal with. We’ve had virtually no problems with our customers.”
She said the hobbit holes are most popular in California and the Pacific Northwest and that they sell about 150 units in total each year.
Next up is larger, adult-scale hobbit holes in which a 6-foot-tall person can easily stand up.
“I’m pretty excited about it,” Pillsbury said. “Only a few people have kids in their lives, and only a few people have chickens. This seems like something that has a broader potential for use.”