Oh, I’m not saying old houses are better (although many of them have more generous sized rooms and plots)
I’m saying as an absolute that the quality of most new build houses in the UK is shit from both design and construction perspectives
A key test for me is look at the back of a new build house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you’re sitting in the back garden.
They fit them with smaller windows so they don’t have to add as much insulation… the list of shitty things the major housebuilders do is pretty long
The garden thing feels like a cultural bug. Sort of, everyone thinks they ought to have a garden, but most people don't actually, in practice, want to do the work to maintain one, nor do they want to pay the extra for the amount of space that makes a good and useful one.
Most of those new-builds with tiny, astroturf-and-slabs gardens and wooden fence panels would be better built as apartment blocks with a shared park. Or, if your cultural aversion to apartments is too strong, as seems to be the case in much of Anglo culture ("my own roof over my own head"), row/terrace-style housing again with outdoor space provided in the form of a shared public or private park.
It seems to work well in parts of Inner London anyway, the Georgian garden squares are way nicer than a garden almost any individual resident would have time to maintain. I don't know why we can't have more of that.
I’m saying as an absolute that the quality of most new build houses in the UK is shit from both design and construction perspectives
A key test for me is look at the back of a new build house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you’re sitting in the back garden.
They fit them with smaller windows so they don’t have to add as much insulation… the list of shitty things the major housebuilders do is pretty long