The thing is, georgian houses only look good if they are actually made with all the right materials and skills - and that stuff is expensive. If you look at all

The thing is, georgian houses only look good if they are actually made with all the right materials and skills - and that stuff is expensive. If you look at all the neoclassical / retro stuff the nazis built, for example, it generally looks really dystopian, no matter how well you look after it, My personal feeling, aesthetics-wise, is that materials look good and work well when you respect their innate properties. Trying to force an aesthetic from one material on another is, at best, a recipe for an cheap and ugly chimera - which is kind of how I view Poundbury. More often, it just results in buildings that don't work (every UK house ever). Georgian buildings come from a specific set of materials and skills, many of which don't really exist any more. You can replace the stucco with concrete or polystyrene or whatever, but it's never going to look the same, because part of the 'aura' of the old stuff is it was made by really skilled people who had generations of experience showing in every move they made.