Every new house around me, nearly every one, is ugly. They either have no architecture or they are builder’s standard stucco with vinyl windows and gargantuan garages. These garages will store junk (not vehicles) and the house will cost $700,000 to build and sell for 1.5 million or 2.5 million and still be the homeliest thing you ever laid eyes on.
These new houses never have symmetry. The windows are too small or there are two many. Random shapes and designs are slapped together and ignorantly mashed up to produce cheap and gaudy eyesores. The most common thing is the all concrete garden with gates, a dozen security lights, cameras, large vehicles on a circular driveway. And a double width, double height iron doorway.
I wonder why there is not a single builder who can just observe and copy classical architecture and create a pleasant, well-proportioned and elegant little house?
Like you see in Denmark.
As an experiment I instructed an AI program to create: “A two story tall Danish house with pitched tile roof and casement windows.”
These are some of the designs it produced. Tell me these aren’t better than 99% of all new houses built in North America.
Here in Van Nuys 
Plenty of room on the ground floor. The kids, grandkids, or guests can go upstairs. Also, those houses are unlikely to be built in the USA as there is a “this is the way we’ve always done it.” idea on the part of most developers, builders, architechs, inspectors, etc. Plus you are asking for “non-standard” materials which will also create a ruckus. I think to the hassle I had in recovering a roof with a very low pitch. No one wanted to hear about it. What I ended up using is made for areas that get hard freezes. Not something that happens on the SoCal coast often. “Wha’dya want that for?”
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It’s more the style of housing not the materials that makes them ugly. I think of the kind of “middle income” developments in Florida where they have cut-de-sacs filled with houses that have enormous garages, badly proportioned windows that are randomly sprayed over the facade. It’s the proportions that are wrong, something they were good at before WWII but suck at now.
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One thing to remember: as one gets old one doesn’t want to deal with stairs.
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