The 'Flintstones' house

Rico's friend Kelley, who also used to live in Palo Alto, California, forwards this article by Jennifer Karmon from Yahoo Homes:

Neighbors who are less charmed than chagrined are apparently stuck with it, as the house is on the market at over four million dollars, 'too high to be a tear-down.' Lookers are finally getting a visual tour of the inside:
For four decades, the so-called Flintstone House (photo, middle) has perplexed and tantalized San Francisco Bay Area commuters who've caught glimpses of its undulating domes from Interstate 280 (photo, top).
It has also mortified and infuriated some of its neighbors in Hillsborough, a wealthy and not-particularly-quirky suburb of San Francisco, California.
Now, for the first time, they're all getting a good look inside. The two-acre property recently hit the market at over four million dollars, about the median home price for the area, according to Zillow.
Let's just say the interior not likely to change the minds of admirers or detractors. It's pretty stylistically consistent outside and in, with a groovy 1970s conversation pit and a kitchen straight out of a science fiction novel.
The home was designed in 1976 by architect William Nicholson, who achieved its multiple domes by inflating special aeronautical balloons, building frames around them from rebar and mesh, then spraying on concrete, or shotcrete. (The so-called Mushroom House in Bethesda, Maryland, which we wrote about a few months ago, used a similar technique, as did the late Dick Clark's even-more-Flintstone-like home; photo, bottom.) The first attempt "just collapsed" after a heavy rain, builder and project manager Wayne Da San Martino recalled to the Silicon Valley magazine the Wave, now defunct, in 2007.
Neighbors "thought the architect was a stoner," he said. "The design was too aggressively new for such a conservative community. I don’t think they’ll ever build something like this again in Hillsborough."
The home went through a period of neglect, and in the mid-1980s the walls developed "deep, prolific cracks that filled with fuzzy mold," the Wave wrote. An architect and waterproofing specialist named B.H. "Danny" Daniller was brought in to fix the home, to the dismay of some nearby residents. According to a report on the repair job, "the condition of the house, both interior and exterior, got to the point where it was considered to be worthless. There was a movement afoot among residents of the area to buy the house for two hundred thousand dollars, demolish it, and recapture most of the cost solely through the value of the land. They were serious about removing this 'blight' from their neighborhood."
Daniller told the Wave: "Many of the neighbors thought it was an eyesore. I think they were disappointed when I repaired it and it got sold again." But the couple who bought it loved it, and they didn't particularly care what the neighbors thought. Tom Petika told the Wave that, when a local reporter called to ask them about local sentiment, "I pointed out that I’d just bought the house because I liked it. The house was available for anyone to buy and bulldoze if they wanted to. "But we thought it was great. I had a friend who would always start phone conversations with, ‘Yabba dabba doo!’ That sort of thing made us really happy."
They lived there for a decade, eventually moving to Santa Rosa in 1996. But Tom Petika reminisced to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997 that it was like a funhouse. "I remember when we first moved in, my wife, Dorothy, and I would walk in and kind of laugh. Nothing in the house was perfectly symmetrical. No ceiling was the same height from room to room. Everything was round. There were no corners. In fact, when it was originally built, there were no interior doors. In no time, we had a door man up there. That was too bizarre for us."
One neighbor hated the house so much he helped establish an architectural review board to prevent any home like that from being built in Hillsborough again, Petika said.
The current owner bought the home from the Petikas  in 1996 for eight hundred thousand dollars and enlisted architect Eugene Tsui, Burning Man artist Dan Das Mann, and the John Lewis Glass Studio to trick out the interior. In 2007, she had the exterior of the home painted orange (it was originally white). There's also one purple accent dome.
Tsui even drew up plans for a rental unit— arguably more outlandish yet — to add to the property. But the planning department balked, he told KPIX-TV 5: "They knew it would attract a lot of attention. Even more so than the first building." That home apparently would have been capped by huge curling strips of stainless steel. "Poetically speaking, the unit is like a swirling cloud formation soaring over the hillside," he wrote of his concept, "with areas that create a peek-a-boo experience of light and shadow. Circling tubes of copper spin below the windows to relate the unit to its golden grassy surroundings."
The Flintstone House has three bedrooms and two baths in about three thousand square feet of living space. Listing agent Judy Meuschke of Alain Pinel Realtors told Yahoo Homes that "I think any creative types that can appreciate the artistry and architecture will be interested." She said that even before it hit the Multiple Listing Service, she'd "received incredible interest; sorting out serious, qualified buyers may be the hardest part." The price tag reflects the fact that "it is truly a work of art, both inside and out," Meuschke said. "It also is located in one of the most desirable markets in the nation.
"We thought it was a fair price for a landmark."
Still, another home that's been compared to The Flintstones, the late Dick Clark's eccentric home (photo, bottom) on a Malibu hilltop, had a tough time finding someone who appreciated it. It sold at half-price after nearly three years on the market.
Given this listing's location in tony Hillsborough, we wondered whether a rich Silicon Valley type might be tempted to buy the property for land value alone and demolish the home to build a new one. Her answer is likely to thrill local looky-loos and dismay some neighbors: "No, this is not a tear-down. It is priced too high to be a tear-down." 

Rico says you just gotta have enough money, and there are people in Silicon Valley who do, for it to be a tear-down...