What’s not to love?

IT may be that unusual houses are the trophy wives of real estate: They can cost a bundle, aren’t especially practical, and some neighbors may wonder, “What were you thinking?” But the real burden comes when it’s time to part company with them.

Although the motto of many an unflagging real estate agent may be “For every house, there is a buyer,” few would argue that the hardest sales are of homes that were built to satisfy an individual’s interests, passions or quirks.

To wit: In Los Angeles County, there are homes that resemble pyramids, houses that require a funicular to reach them, at least one house built of mud and straw and a place aptly nicknamed “the Eyeball House.” In this land of make-believe and money, what else would you expect?

But as agent Gary Harryman of Pritchett-Rapf’s Topanga office said, although many house hunters ooh and ah over the pages of Architectural Digest, when it comes to buying a house for their families, “99% of them buy the traditional.”

The challenge in selling such a place, Harryman said, is to embrace the home’s oddity and promote its uniqueness.

An imaginative marketing plan, an open-ended time frame and flexibility in the sales price probably will be required. And the real estate adage “location, location, location” still applies.

Most buyers in this hot market are concerned about finding anything at all to buy in their price range and focus on the quality of neighborhood schools and the number of bedrooms. But those who opt for the unusual are frequently looking for a home that makes a statement.

So how do you sell a house built to look like a pyramid -- listed in Malibu for $2.45 million? Harryman, who has the listing, said he brings the house to the pool of buyers -- the mountain to Mohammed, if you will.

He ran an ad in the Hollywood Reporter -- not a typical venue for real estate advertising -- and is surfing the Net, hoping to interest a blogger or three in linking to photos of the house. And then there are Sky and Telescope and Astronomy magazines, where he said he is likely to turn next.

For this house, Harryman said, there would be no point in holding an open house beyond the one he held just for the neighbors. “You’d get looky-loos but unlikely a serious buyer,” he said.

The mountaintop, ocean-view, 3,800-square-foot pyramid is the 25-year labor of love of Bill and Sally Fletcher, who aren’t sure what their next home will look like but do have an idea of who their buyer will be: “Someone like us,” Bill said.

The Fletchers are astronomy photographers and, in Bill’s words, “are just infatuated with the pyramid shape and its energy.” They of course share that infatuation -- and their interest in astronomy -- with the ancient Egyptians, none of whom will be found looking for homes in Malibu.

The three-bedroom, three-bath pyramid home faces the magnetic north, and the Fletchers spent a year marking the days on the sun clock embedded in the quartzite-stone living-room floor.

“These may not be your typical sales talking points,” Harryman said, “but it is music to someone’s ears.”

Harryman priced the pyramid based on its square footage, views and uniqueness -- which he put a premium on. The local schools are considered exemplary too.

Tom O’Rourke, a real estate agent with Prudential California John Aaroe Division, has an easier job marketing odd houses. For the last 19 years, he has been selling homes in Laurel Canyon, known for its eccentric housing stock and its perhaps even more eccentric buyers.

Those interested in Laurel Canyon -- put on the map by Joni Mitchell and kept there by the Doors -- come seeking the unusual. And much of the housing stock -- in what has been called “Haight-on-the-hill” -- is precisely that.

“Seventy percent of residents here work in the entertainment industry,” O’Rourke said. “There is a premium on the unusual.”

A traditional two-bedroom, two-bathroom house sold for $695,000 last year. A month later on the same street, another two-bedroom, two-bathroom house -- this one designed to resemble a castle -- sold for $846,000, 20% more. Both had the same square footage.

More original, more money. “That’s Laurel Canyon,” he said.

Shawn Thompson was thrilled to pay $395,000 a year ago for a Laurel Canyon house he had been renting that was made from mud and straw. The building materials alone would give many pause, but there’s also the front door, which has settled about 6 inches on one side, and the indoor, igloo-shaped, adobe fireplace where the mud bricks for the house were baked. The house has grown from 600 square feet to about 2,000 square feet; part of it is rented out.

“When the home inspector came, he kind of scratched his head a few times,” Thompson said. The inspection process found nothing that Thompson didn’t already know about, but it did document the eccentricities of the house and was helpful in price negotiation.

“When people come in, they mostly comment on what a great space this is,” said his wife, Lisa. “And then they notice how crooked everything is.”

When the previous owner first asked them, as tenants, whether they wanted to buy the house, they laughed, Lisa said. “But truth is, we got it for a pretty good price, and we already knew all the nuances of the place.”

Thompson, a film editor, loves his home’s uniqueness and history -- much of it legend.

“Supposedly, this is where Bugsy Siegel kept Virginia Hill,” he said. Also, a speakeasy and brothel purportedly were run out of a hidden room behind the bookcase.

Sometimes such oddities seal the deal. Realty agent O’Rourke -- a fellow who sees lemons and thinks only lemonade -- once sold a house built over a fresh spring, which flows through the basement. The owners made the cellar into a wine-tasting room and imbibe “by the side of the river.”

Also in Laurel Canyon on Oak Court are two homes accessible by funiculars -- little miners’ carts that work on a pulley system -- that have changed hands several times over the years. The alternative at one property is climbing 200 steps.

If he were to market one of the houses, O’Rourke said he would appeal to a buyer’s thirst for exercise.

An atypical home in an atypical area is one thing. But how marketable is a really unusual home if traditional ones surround it -- like the one in Woodland Hills nicknamed “the Eyeball House”? It was designed by prominent U.S. architect Bruce Goff, who, according to David DeLong, author of a book on Goff, is known for doing “architectural portraits” of his clients.

The four-level wood frame house with eye-shaped windows and a protruding bedroom balcony was intended for one man: Al Struckus, an engineer described by his family as “quite a character” who sought out Goff in Texas and got him to design a house to fit on his 50-foot-by-100-foot lot off Canoga Avenue.

Struckus died in 1993, just a year after his dream home was completed. His adult children kept the one-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot house for a few years but decided to sell it in 1998 and listed it for about $380,000. It sat on the market for a little while, drawing curiosity seekers but no serious buyers. The family eventually dropped the price.

“It was hard for us to part with,” daughter Loxi Struckus Hagthrop said. “It was such a big part of my father’s life. We really wanted a buyer who would appreciate the house.”

Eventual buyers Ann and Kevin Marshall, who both work at the Getty Center, appreciated it plenty.

Familiar with Goff and the house, they were thrilled when they learned it was for sale, and after the price dropped, they quickly made an offer.

But even when a buyer is found for a quirky property, as the Marshalls learned firsthand, the sale is far from a done deal. Problems with financing can quash things pretty quickly. The Marshalls were initially turned down by several lenders unwilling to give them a mortgage on such an unusual home.

Lenders require a clear sense of the property’s value before they make a loan. To determine the value, appraisers look for comparable sales, and a house that has no equivalent is quickly pegged as risky.

One way around this is for buyers of unusual properties to pay cash or use seller financing. In the Marshalls’ case, they persevered and eventually got a loan.

Although selling the home was painful, Hagthrop said, she thought her father would be pleased with the Marshalls’ appreciation of it.

Sometimes, even in the case of trophies, it really is all about love.