My grandfather, who was not in real estate but did spend forty-three years selling cattle, used to say that a man buying a ranch was really buying the sky over it. The cattle came and went; the grass came and went; the sky stayed.
I have come, after twenty years of doing this work, to believe roughly the same thing about hill country houses. You are not, in the end, buying the kitchen, or the wine cellar, or the second-story balcony. You are buying the thing those rooms point at.
A useful question.
Stand on the lot. Close your eyes for ten seconds. Open them. What did you see when you opened them? If the answer is "the view," you are probably buying the right property. If the answer is "the architecture," ask yourself, slowly, whether you would still buy this property if it were stripped to the studs and rebuilt by someone whose taste you mildly disapproved of.
A good view is permanent. A house, however well-built, is twenty-five years from a renovation. Buy the thing that does not change.
“You are, in the end, buying the thing those rooms point at.”
The one exception.
There is exactly one case where I tell families to ignore this advice, and that is when the house itself is a piece of architectural history — a Lautner, an O'Neil Ford, an Eppright original in Westlake. In that case, the house is the view. But these are vanishingly rare, and you will know one when you see one.
For everything else, the rule holds. Buy the lot. The house is a guest on it.
