The Places We Love To Live

So I was wondering why it is that by and large most authors want to live in old houses. I personally would love to live in something gothic. The Addams family estate, perhaps.
My last home was an almost 300 year old farmhouse. It looked like this:

It pre-dated the American Revolution by 3 years and I loved it very much. We used to joke that the downstairs bedroom (my study) had a ghost because it was always about ten degrees colder in that room. Actually it wasn’t that funny.
The houses we’re looking at now are all of a certain age and resemble these fine estates:

Or this lovely English brick establishment which I believe belonged to some writer called J. Austen.

Or these, although I’ve heard they can be awfully drafty.
My aunt lives in a 3 hundred year old sheepman’s cottage perched on a hill in Wales. My godmother lives in one of the few thatched cottages left in Oxfordshire. My grandmother resides in a historical landmark in the Cotswolds and had to get a royal dispensation(or something) to add a sunroom. I grew up in a three story Victorian brick house and feel that a house is not a true house without an attic and perhaps a cellar.
I wonder if the age and history inspire our imaginations. If the stones or timbers hold so much of human life and death that it seeps out and into our brains. Maybe I am just a romantic.
Every writer I know lives in an old home. None of them live in something like this, although I can see the appeal if you’re twenty years old and like to shoot at tin cans and write on a manual typewriter:

Although I am quite willing to live here

Or here

if pushed.
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