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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Arlington is SO UGLY and it kills me because the convenience can’t be matched and we love the amenities. CCH is the exception but there’s a bunch of awful new builds popping up there too that are killing the feel of the neighborhood. I don’t get it because the average new builds in Vienna and Alexandria are 10x more charming. Why?? The only thing I can find is the Arlington builders tend to be different from the Vienna ones and so on. [/quote]
I’d love to see a new build in the style of Alexandria homes in Arlington and McLean![/quote]

Most of these charming Alexandria City homes are old classic stately homes built with brick on all four sides and slate roofs that have been tastefully renovated and maintained. These construction materials are ridiculously expensive to use in a new build in 2026.

Developers doing new builds in the $1.8 - 3 million range in Arlington would be unprofitable if they built with these classic materials. It’s near-impossible to do, unless someone commissions a custom home — and even then they’d likely have to pay cash or cover a big appraisal gap to get a mortgage.[/quote]

I am surprised that the subset of folks who are spending several million on a house aren’t working directly with a builder to build a custom house with higher end materials![/quote]

It can be done, but it’s just far more expensive to custom build. Plus you have to be willing to wait a long time for land to be acquired, go through the lengthy back and forth of a custom design process, then the home to be built from scratch. You also take on more risk vs an already built home, like what if the builder goes belly up halfway through the process and leaves you.

All that said there has been a trend of expensive SFH new builds in Arlington being exceptionally ugly over the past few years. Hopefully at some point they’ll hire someone who can design a tasteful house, but hey, people have been buying these ugly beasts, so what’s the incentive for them to try harder?[/quote]

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