Ugly Renovations Prove That Money and Taste Have Never Once Been the Same Thing

Let’s begin with the cubes, because the cube people are the most prolific offenders. Time and again in this collection, a warm brick home with proportion and history is demolished or clad into a windowless white rectangle, the architectural equivalent of a heavy sigh. There’s a Georgian property reduced to what I can only describe as a refrigerator box with a doorbell. There’s a bungalow converted into a gray form that immediately reads as a dental practice, and now the neighbors walk past instinctively worried about a cleaning appointment. These aren’t homes anymore. They’re renderings that escaped the software and got built.

Then the color crimes, which is where I become genuinely emotional. Somebody removed a set of blue shutters. Blue shutters! A house that had one cheerful feature, one small act of joy against the elements, and someone looked at it and thought “insufficiently bleak.” There’s a white cottage split into mismatched charcoal and white halves, giving the strong impression that the crew ran out of paint and simply committed to the error. And the millennial gray infestation runs through this entire gallery like damp, because someone somewhere decided that the ideal home should evoke a cloudy Tuesday and the whole market agreed without discussion.

And finally the villain lairs, where the renovations stopped pretending to be residential. A red brick house with a genuine turret, a turret, demolished for a blocky structure with security gates. A charming woodland property converted into something resembling a concrete bunker, which raises the serious question of what those homeowners know that we don’t. A modest beach house replaced with a structure that reads unmistakably as a regional bank branch. And a hillside property now hosting what appears to be a docked cruise ship. Look how they massacred my boy. I use that phrase deliberately. I have earned it this morning.

Here’s the actual tragedy underneath my theatrics: character is the one thing money cannot buy back. A brick turret represents a mason, a design decision, a period, all of it accumulated over decades and destroyed in an afternoon by a contractor with a sledgehammer and a mood board. The new build cost more. It will be dated within eight years. And the thing it replaced was never coming back, which is the specific grief people feel scrolling these photos even if they can’t name it.

And I understand the impulse, I do. Gray sells. The neutral box photographs well, appeals to the widest buyer pool, offends nobody. But a house that offends nobody also delights nobody, and I’d argue delight is the entire point of a building someone has to look at every single day for the rest of their life. So paint something. Keep the shutters. Leave the brick alone. Future generations will scroll past your home and feel something, and “something” is the highest achievement architecture has ever managed.

The turret is gone. The brick was innocent. Please, I’m begging, keep the shutters.