Stevenage New Town Revisited

Usually we prefer new things to old things. As far as I am concerned, I want to live in a modern new house rather than an old house. But when I first visited one of the British new towns nineteen years ago, I realized that some people loved old houses. I could not understand the reason. One person told me that old houses were scarce so the property values of old houses were high; this might be an economical explanation and it does not say anything about the housing preferences of ordinary people. Although new town houses were new and functional, they were not supposed to be very "pretty"; this was the answer that I deducted from the conversations with some people living there. I could not really understand what the word pretty meant exactly.