A well designed home can be  a joy to its owners and does not need to cost as much as a home that is poorly designed with no thought of how it will be used by its owner.

Extravagant costs are only that: extravagance, quite often as a substitute for taste and almost always using the desire to impress others as the motivation for the design. How many times does a client come to their chosen designer with their list of hopes for the “Wow Factor” of their new building? In fact, good design and aesthetics are quite separate from cost and many costly homes, in my opinion, are often laughably devoid of any style or cohesiveness, the whole concept being held together only by the desire to display presumed wealth.  
 
As Heinrich Engel wrote in his classic The Japanese House- A Tradition for Contemporary Living: “Only too often, the mere amount of the cost is taken as an aesthetic standard.”