The house above is 1600-1700 square feet, small by modern standards, and needs two more bathrooms (which are expensive rooms). I think you could safely double

The house above is 1600-1700 square feet, small by modern standards, and needs two more bathrooms (which are expensive rooms). I think you could safely double the materials cost to get something close to what a modern family would want, larger, with wiring, air, etc: $94k Labor is typically about the cost of the materials. So double the cost again. $188k A rule of thumb is the house should cost about 3x what the lot you build on does. Obviously this varies wildly, but let's use it for an example, because it gets us to a nice round number of 250k. I just don't see new builds in that price range anywhere even approaching the quality and aesthetics of this house. That's not to say that in rust-belt towns you can't buy old homes of a similar era for around that cost (or much less, if the economy has tanked, e.g. detroit) but new builds in that price range are gonna be stucco sh*t boxes. When I say "fractal detail" I mean that the house has visual interest at different scales: the eaves are interesting up close, at five feet, at fifty feet, etc. It's detailing (often disparaged, and sometimes fairly, as ornament) that requires a level of care and craftsmanship to execute far out of proportion to, say, slapping up a long stucco wall with some flashing. I suppose I'm not going to convince anyone of much, but I think that many of the excuses for the atrociousness of modern buildings are intellectually lazy.