Yeah! Watching any episode of (UK) daytime-TV's "Homes Under the Hammer" will reveal any number of properties - some with real character - refurbished with every shade of grey you can imagine. It looks awful to be honest and really, what kind of philistine paints over real wood anyway? What really bugs me is the way the estate agents visit afterwards and say "how tastefully it's been renovated".

But what if you look at it from an auction theory perspective. If there's a set of buyers with a set of bids, you're trying to get a large set of buyers (if you're pulling samples from a distribution, more samples = higher max), but you're also trying to increase the value these buyers are willing to pay (shift the distribution to the right). I wonder if there's some amount of customization, in a healthy housing market (tons of buyers) that you can do that increases the expected max bid despite decreasing number of prospective buyers.

My guess is that most things that would boost selling price while narrowing buyers are not cheap which cancels (or mostly cancels) out the price increase, making it cheaper and more foolproof to go the boring inoffensive route.

Right, for example if I was shopping right now a house elevator would be a huge positive to me as my daughter is a wheelchair user and will be getting more difficult to carry up and down the stairs.

That said as someone who was in a lot of middle class and upper class homes due to a previous job, I saw exactly one elevator in a single family home. I doubt it would even factor into the price because most people would have no interest in even using the elevator beyond a novelty.

HGTV's Home Town goes for a more vernacular look, so is to be applauded. What they do seems more labor intensive though.