I grew up in a 600 year old house. That isn't particularly unusual in the part of the UK I was born in. The village church is 1200 years old. There's a chapel not too far away that dates from around 600 AD.

We're not going to change it much. We fix it when it breaks.

Most of North America (or at least, the bits I've visited) seems to be fixated with new buildings of sometimes questionable construction standards, and they tend to get replaced fairly regularly. One of my Canadian friends told me that "People prefer to live in new houses". Here, the opposite is much more common.

It's funny - I grew up in a country with the same mentality as in the UK. But I've now come around a bit more toward the American approach: I still see the merit in preserving history but besides that, what is a good argument for constructing a house to last for a very long time? See, whenever you buy an older house and start renovating it, more often than not you start running into unexpected things that need to be updated. Partly because the original construction may have been especially shoddy (think post-war years), but even for houses that are younger than that, changes in the building code often require updates to the building.

But then, why did the code change in the first place? Some cynics will say "so that they can keep making money" but most of the times it is to synchronize with changes that have happened all around is, including the development of new materials, gained knowledge about the impact of natural factors (not only in earth quake regions), and - in our generation - increased expectations regarding energy consumption (insulation).

All the old houses that do not undergo renovation are way out of sync with modern considerations that manifest themselves in any current building code. So why not tear down a house after 100 years and build a new one from scratch? That process is, of course, quite a bit simpler for the more light-weight wooden houses in North America.

A lot of the construction snobism in Europe against American construction standards is unfounded. As far as residential homes are concerned, I don't believe that there are many advantages of brick constructions over wooden framing besides better soundproofing for most intents and purposes.

Of course, one important thing to consider in this discussion is the availability of land: in North America, outside of the big cities, there is still plenty of land available for building new building while Old Europe is already pretty tightly built up. A lot of the land is in private hands and often unlikely to be turned into lots. Plus, for North America with its car-centric developments, it's easier to find usable unoccupied land that will not force you into crazy long commutes. This is more difficult in some parts of Europe, where the ratio of people to square foot of land is much higher.

A house, or any other infrastructure. IMHO a big factor in America's capacity for reinvention and renewal is not being saddled with infrastructure designed to last for centuries. Disclose: I live and work in England, love old buildings and own a 19th Century home made from Malvern Stone.

What do you get with new houses? Well, you get wiring, with outlets conveniently located. You get modern plumbing. You ought to get good insulation.

You may not get good design, you may get shoddy construction, true.

This is all true (although not all old houses are poorly insulated -- the ~60 cm of thatch and wattle and daub construction also is surprisingly good at insulation. It even comes complete with Tudor-era built in biomass heating!).

I think a lot of the bad press that goes on about new builds in the UK at least at the moment are due to "chicken coop Barrett Homes", i.e. a large developer building the largest number of houses possible with the cheapest construction method. There are horror stories in the tabloid press of people buying houses from ~2000 that are starting to have major structural problems, or have other major flaws. The rooms are meaner in size and there is a lot of resentment about developers making ~£300k profit on each property (and building ~200 of them at a go).

Obviously, there's a massive selection / survival bias here. Bad homes are more likely to be demolished. Good homes are more likely to survive.

There's a bit of a question about how much of the house is actually left from 200 years ago.

My house was technically built in 1897 but was moved in the 1920s on to a new foundation and we basically knocked the entire thing down and rebuilt it a few years ago after we bought it. Now we're adding to it again. It shares some of the DNA of that house from 1897 but basically none of the parts anymore and is much nicer looking whilst keeping the old timey style.

Mentioned earlier in the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Probably not much.

My contractor for a couple of big renovations I did figured that the 4x4-ish posts on the first floor were probably original along with at least some of the subflooring (about half of which I redid because it was collapsing). We think there was a substantial addition (probably including a second floor) around 1900. That's when the demolished barn on the now adjacent property dated to.

The house I grew up in was similar. It dated to either the 1700s or possibly even late 1600s. But the original house was just two rooms (two stories) built into the side of a hill.