That was an interesting watch, especially as I recognise a number of the places they were filming.
As a mild counterpoint, before my mother died, she lived in a beautiful 200 year old cottage on the banks of the River Severn, in Shropshire, UK. She actually lived in a very small town called Ironbridge, which is credited as being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and takes it’s name from world’s first major bridge made from cast iron, that is at the town’s center. Mum’s cottage was a classic English cottage in the country, down a tiny lane that you struggled to get anything larger than a normal (European normal) car along. The garden was full of flowers, and it overlooked one of England’s major rivers. So, where am I going with this? By most aesthetic standards, it was beautiful.
But…
It was also dark (tiny windows), damp (old cottages can be, despite numerous damp treatments), had small rooms (want a super-king bed? 
Mum’s standard sized bed frame had to be cut in half to get it up the stairs!), and was cold in the winter (despite the central heating, the insulation was dreadful). To get to the bathroom, you had to walk through the dining room, and the bathroom (what would have originally been an outhouse on the back of the cottage) was absolutely freezing in the winter. Oh, and the windows / doors could not be upgraded to highly insulating modern ones as the whole area is a conservation area with stringent planning conditions.
When mum died, we did consider buying the cottage, but eventually decided against it. As the presenter said in the film, in the modern world, we seem to value convenience and utility. My house has large rooms, it’s light (especially as we have an 8m of glass across the back of it) , it’s warm, has bathrooms in the right place etc etc etc. Is it the most beautiful structure? Certainly, the ‘curb appeal’ of mum’s house was far higher, but convenience trumps pretty…there are no river views from my garden, but the train station is 5 minutes walk from the front door and I can be in central London, and walking along the Embankment, looking at the Thames and those Victorian streetlights in 40 minutes.
PS, @Ed‘s comment about teachers watching the boys in the school showers… Seemed to be a thing in UK schools in the 70s / 80s… 
