One way to stand out on Zillow: A full-home Lego replica

Houses are built brick by brick. So, too, are Lego renderings of houses. A recent real estate listing in Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill neighborhood features both.

Pictures of the three-bedroom, four-bath townhouse with a $1.2 million price tag show a stone path lined by flowers leading to the black front door, a map over the bar by the staircase, a polka-dot rug by the bed, and a walk-in closet with a drawer unit and hanging clothes. The Lego version captures those very same details.

“When we initially met with our clients, they showed us the Lego house that they built. And we thought it was just something, you know, we’ve never seen before,” says Denny Horner, the listing agent. Normally, marketing for a property that’ll be coming to market soon gets posted with a floor plan or a picture of the front door. When the team began preparing to list the house, the staging team hadn’t yet done their work and the property needed to be painted. “We thought: ‘We have a creative client. Let’s be a little creative in our marketing.’”

It took Andrew Huddleston months to re-create his beloved townhouse with Legos. Previously, he had completed other ambitious projects using the iconic building blocks, including large-scale framed portraits of characters from the show “Dallas” in a style aping 1980s computer graphics. But he particularly loves assembling actual buildings with them.

“It was a couple years ago and our house was fairly new, and we sort of settled in and finally got it where we decorated the way we want it, and so I just thought this would be a good labor of love,” he says. He took pains to make it as realistic and to-scale as possible.

It’s a four-story townhouse, and Huddleston wanted to render the footprint as realistically as possible. First, he had to figure out the overall proportion of the rooms, windows, stairways and other key features. Then, using the bricks he had on hand, he began to build each floor separately.

He ordered additional Legos, such as the dark red blocks for the exterior, “so that I would have the right colors.” To replicate the framed hummingbird portraits in the living room and other artwork, he took photographs and then miniaturized them onto stickers he affixed to large Lego tiles.

This is the first time Horner has included Legos in a real estate listing, and “so far it’s been a pretty good response,” he says. Already, the listing has been shared by Zillow Gone Wild, the social media account that boosts wacky, astonishing or otherwise noteworthy homes for sale.

Adding a sprinkling of the unexpected to a real estate listing — such as 12-foot skeletons or a lounging Spider-Man — can attract additional eyeballs to the property. “It definitely helps bring attention and exposure, which is our ultimate goal,” Horner says.

For previous listings, Horner has featured artists’ work in the staging. “It’s like an art show event for the listing, typically on higher-end properties,” he says. “It’s just another way to get people in the house.”

Huddleston and his husband moved to the West Coast last week, leaving their Capitol Hill townhouse behind. But they packed up the Lego version and brought it with them. “I put too much into it to take it apart,” he says. “It would break my heart.”