How to make a decent looking house

Here's how to make a decent looking house! First, we all build this - the basic box - for our first home:



But it's boring.

An easy way to spice this up is to add contrast in colors. Right now the building is predominantly one material, but we can fix that easily by adding different materials for the corners. We need to pick a color that goes well with the material in the screenshot, but also does not blend in as the same color. Stone brick is grey-ish, so that's out, but wood planks is brown.



Ah ha! It's not much, but it's a simple change that makes a big difference. Now our new problem is that the walls and roof are completely flat without detail.

You do NOT want to make one of these roofs:



The roof has gotten (vaguely) better, but the sides have gotten worse.

Instead, I recommend using stairs for a roof. It's definitely expensive and can be painful to make, but you'll end up with a much better house. Start laying the stairs so that they overhang the roof a bit:



As you can see, the roof does not start on top of the house -- it starts on the side. The advantage of is that is that no wall is flat, which is an important and simple rule to follow to have a decent house.

Keep laying the stairs:







Now if we go inside, we can take away our old boring flat roof to reveal a pretty cool vaulted roof:



However, you'll notice that there is a sudden change in materials between the walls and the roof, so we're just going to move the ceiling up a bit and use wood instead. The roof is generally not something you see when you're inside your house (unless you're in the attic), so we don't want to see it.



So this is our home for now:



Better, but still boring. The walls are still flat, although the roof's overhang makes it better. Glass panes are an easy way to add depth to a wall and also give light to your home:





The sides are better -- what about the front?



This is actually not bad, but there's still a huge amount of unused space in the front that is devoid of detail. One common way to fix this is to add a crossbar:



Great! Our house started with just the usual cobble box and ended up quite nice! However, we can also add some flair to it. Our foundation is still a box, so we can add wings to our box to make it better.



Now you'll have to choose a good size for the wing. It's a wing, so it should not dominate the main house in size. That means that it shouldn't extend out too far. In this case, this wing is a bit too far, but we'll see how it turns out.

Build the rest of the wall.



Then add the roof in the same way to this wing. Note that it overhangs here too!



Whoop, we've got an issue below. The roofs are now connecting, but not so well:



We can fix this by having the ends be wood plank blocks:



Now we complete the roof:



Whoo, not a bad house! If we had made it a bit taller, we would have had a second floor as an attic. The wing extends out a bit farther than it should but it's acceptable.

Let's look at the first house on the world of Welwyn. It started as a cobble box with a roof made out of stairs but it grew from there:



The wing extends out less in this house and the house's shape feels more balanced. The wing's roof is also lower than the main roof and the intersection is cleaner.

If we look at the foundation, we have a combination of rectangles rather than a single rectangle



With a taller house, the front wall was even more plain. I added stairs above the door (a "mini-roof") to counteract that.



Inside:



Note that the floor and wall materials are different. You want contrast inside your home as well.

The attic:

 

I saw that video, but the house he ends up with is ugly.