Council house looks like council house

Similar idea round here; all council houses have "council windows". Ugly windows with a thick frame right down the middle and crap mechanisms for opening.

I'm a council tenant and was very lucky to get a home in a nice area and spacious enough for my family. I've lived here for 8 years now and probably will for another few years (saving for a deposit is nigh impossible).

This area will have, at one point, been all council houses but the "right to buy" means that now, council houses are the minority.

I suppose it does irk me a little that regardless of how much I look after my garden, upgrade the front of my property with paint, door fixtures, potted plants etc - I still stick out to the whole street as one of the "council" people. Perhaps I'm merely imagining the snobbery and its not factual, but I doubt it.

Council houses here look better than privately owned. All have new rough casting and new roofs. The insides were done a while back through some council home improvement scheme. They are better looked after with tax money than privately owned homes where owners scrimp and scrape if they are lucky enough to afford such things.

It varies. My first house was ex-LA and it looked like a perfectly normal (if smallish) 1930s, bay window terrace. Massive garden and good build quality. Architects were employed directly by councils in the heyday of public housing, so designs varied.

The big estates even as far back as the thirties looked quite homogeneous and from the sixties onwards brutalist architecture took over for a while. So there’s that, but people pay small fortunes to live in the Barbican, so it wasn’t all terrible.

The only way you know they are council round here is everyone has the same door.

My Mum owns an ex council house, she's been there ten years. I only realised it was ex council when she told me recently

It's a really nice house. It's like a Tardis inside. Good size garden too and she's an amazing gardener. I would have absolutely no issues with living there and saying it was my house

In my Dad's village though the council houses do look all the same and very drab, even the bought one's

I know what you mean, although in some older houses I don't mind it because they were well built, if uniform.

But yes, slapping oddly coloured cladding or balconies or railings on newly built estates does announce to the world that these are council properties, and I don't think it benefits anyone.

It's not a problem specific to council housing, we've really lost our touch for building beautiful houses / streets. The Victorians were masters of good civic architecture, now everything we build is an unimaginative heterogeneous mass of glass and concrete boxes. And don't get me started on the cramped and cheap identikit new build housing which gets thrown up. Absolutely awful housing provision.

My BIL is a builder, he said when he has worked on new build estates, the HA properties differ from the private ones massively. Normally no garages or drives, no patios or turf laid, no carpet put down, cheaper kitchen installed and no options offered to tenant's.

I don't know what 'looking like a council house' means exactly, but I think the trend for brightly coloured panels all over buildings (commercial and domestic) should be drawing to a close shortly.

What's wrong with looking like a council house?