And some of these homes need the maintenance and repairs required for any home built decades or even a century ago.

WSJ: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Frank Lloyd Wright Homes

Some pundits agonise that profit growth built on the impoverishment of workers at home and the export of jobs abroad as firms outsource operations to China and India cannot be sustained: consumer confidence will fall, demand will plummet and profits will collapse.

ECONOMIST: Business is booming almost everywhere

The Home Builders Federation, however, said that if new homes were built bigger, some people would be priced out of the market.

BBC: Architects say new houses are 'shameful shoebox homes'

Achor Achor and I built a facsimile of our Group Twelve home on our coffee table and then we laughed some more.

NPR: Eggers Blends Fact, Fiction of Sudanese 'Lost Boys'