THE LOVE OF LOOK : Our Favorite Activity? Not Sports. Not Soaking Up L.A.’s Natural Beauty. It’s House-Gazing

Baseball’s big again around here, I guess, and everyone follows the Raiders. But in Southern California, half the people you meet pay more attention to the real estate market than to their actual jobs. House-gazing is the most popular sport in town, and that every Sunday, half of Los Angeles seems to follow the well-marked open-house trail.

Walking through an open house is quite different than seeing a house with a real estate agent, which often has the creepy-crawly aspect of breaking into a home, fitting a strange key into an unfamiliar lock, prowling around somebody else’s dirty cereal bowls. With an agent, as you check the silverware drawers for heft and peek into the bedroom closets, your perspective isn’t much different from a burglar’s. Plus, the logistics, the act of arranging for a salesperson to cruise to Monrovia in her Infiniti, implies a certain seriousness of purpose.

The open-house thing is different--more like going into a stranger’s house and trying on her life for 15 minutes. There are all kinds of justifications for going to an open house, from teaching yourself about architecture or acquainting yourself with “the market” to--once in a while--actually looking for a house. You can always tell yourself you were just driving by. But essentially, the experience is about voyeurism. There are the neighbors, leaning on the dining room table, arguing about which half of which block is considered more tree-lined than the next, whose kitchen island is the biggest, which couple is farther along in “restoring” their bungalow to standards set out in some 1909 issue of “The Craftsman.” You can pass a house a dozen times a day for years without suspecting the presence of a bomb shelter, a meditation pyramid in the study, a basement laden with complicated hardware, the purpose of which you’d rather not know. (You really have to wonder about a guy who puts on public display a bedroom lined with padded black felt.)

Going to these open houses can be like checking in on a subculture, a distinct tribe of people as recognizable in their way as martial arts enthusiasts or the crowd at Wednesday night Music Guild concerts at the Wilshire Ebell. Follow the flags on Sunday mornings and you’ll see flocks of them, wearing slightly vacant looks in their eyes, marked-up copies of the Saturday Times crumpled on the floorboards of their Camrys and a propensity for opening the medicine cabinets and guest room bureaus of people they will never meet. Like regular theatergoers congregating in a lobby after a play, they chatter about the hits and flops of the season, the glass-sheathed Lloyd Wright they saw in Altadena last year, the Tiffany fixtures in the mansion on Oak Lawn, the Ocean Park Spanish with an interior seemingly inspired by repeated screenings of “Stalag 17.”

And why not, I suppose--if you’d spend a weekend afternoon gallery hopping on La Cienega or at Bergamot Station, why not sample the even more evocative art installations that announce themselves with banners and bright balloons. As surely as window decorators at Nordstrom, the sellers set up tableaux vivants of idealized lives, ripe peaches glowing in cut-glass bowls, Vivaldi on the stereo, a copy of the new Jane Smiley novel left open on a night stand. Nurseries are as neat and pink as a showroom at Bellini, stuffed animals regimented on a child-bed, blocks picked up, plaques lovingly inscribed with birth dates and portraits of storks. It is nearly as disappointing to walk into an open house stripped bare of its owners’ belongings as it is to tour one disfigured with cottage-cheese ceilings and high-pile orange carpeting. Inquiring minds want to know.

But if everything works out, you almost want to live there.