To do my kind of architecture requires a level of taste and wealth that is pretty damned rare. If you could even assemble a team of craftsmen to do the building.
In short, few would want the kind of houses I'm talking about. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe people are tired of shoddily built houses full of cheap and toxic materials. Either way, the housing market is in the shitter and so is the economy, so it's just a pipe dream, and my pipe's been empty for years.
People with that amount of cash and discriminating tastes won't buy your house, they'll buy their house instead.
Despite my love of well-crafted houses with interesting architectural detail, this whole thing started when I was looking for a house a couple years ago. I noticed these cheesy mcmansions in crappy little new developments going for $450-500k (average in this area is around $150-200 for a 3br 2ba) and a beautiful tudor that was almost a mansion going for the same price in a great old gentrified neighborhood filled with mature trees. Who in their right mind picks the cheaply built house over the well-built and maintained one??
Crazy. But apparently most people don't give a shit about quality when paying a half million dollars for the place they live.
If I ever won the lottery and could buy a million-dollar plot of land and build a house on it, I'd be shopping around for an architect who could design me a nice Victorian-style mansion. So you get working on your architecture degree, Sky, and I'll buy a lotto ticket.