Lothlorien (Also known as "Loth") is a cooperative house consisting of two former mansions built next to the University of California, Berkeley, United States.

The North House was built in the 19th century for American attorney and one of the initial water rights advocates in the United States George Hebard Maxwell.

Lothlorien has retained some principles of the previous residents - a communal culture that emphasizes vegetarianism and artistic creativity and rejecting individualism and conservative social norms.

[2] Three years earlier College of California commissioned campus and residential property development from Frederic Law Olmstead, an already well known landscape architect.

Olmstead designed a campus with the residential subdivision directly south of it, composed of "large domestic houses, on ample lots with garden set backs, enhanced by sidewalk boulevards and plantings that would become luxuriant and graceful to shelter the visitor from the sun [would] express the manifestations of a refined domestic life.

[4][3] In the shape of a square the hillside property was split through the middle by Piedmont Way which ran parallel to Prospect Street on the eastern border.

Now known as Piedmont Avenue, a California Historical Landmark, it was designed to be a curvilinear street lined with trees, rounded corners, a planted median, and a large garden circle at its main intersection, it is considered to be prototype for his later idea of a parkway.

[11][12] The Maxwell family sold their Piedmont mansion in 1903 to a real estate developer and his wife, Fred and Alice Clark, who owned the house for only several years, but during that time moved it further up hill, two blocks east to 2405 Prospect Street.

[16] With the completion of Memorial Stadium in 1923 and the International House in 1929, the Piedmont Avenue area transferred from one of quiet, expansive mansions into a student-oriented neighborhood for Greek Lives.

[26] Beginning in the late 1960s the popularity of University of California Greek Life was decreasing with many near campus fraternities and sororities being unable maintain their leases, and were often replaced by student cooperatives and religious organizations.

[27] Subsequently, in early 1973 the two properties were rented by the One World Family Commune (OWFC), a UFO and Christianity based new religious movement, considered by some to be a cult.

[28][29] A New Age, hippie community, it largely consisted of young people who rejected capitalism and western religion, and instead focused on artistic expression, a closer connection to nature through macrobiotic diet and psychedelics, communal living, and non-monogamous relationships.

[37] In 1970, it opened the One World Family Natural Foods and Entertainment Center was located in a large building on Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street in Southside part of Berkeley.

[42][41] Berkeley Student Cooperative (BSC) bought both houses the summer of 1975, and opened Lothlorien as vegetarian themed co-op that fall.

[44][45] Although there was no connection, organization or member wise, between BSC and One World Family Commune, Lothloriens retained some key principles of OWFC.

[50] Collaboration and community living are emphasized, it is the only BSC house to make decisions by Quaker based consensus, rather than majority vote.

[53] Lothloriens joined other activists in the university oak grove controversy, where a tree sitting near the Memorial Stadium lasted from December 2006 to September 2008.

[60] The trail was searched extensively by the police and volunteers, and several days later someone reported seeing Lee on the side of the road being forced into a van by a heavy set man.