Owning your own home

Not necessarily - my bosses have/had an incredibly modern house in quite an historic area (hint, it's spitting distance from Norths); sneakily built over the shell of the former property, which was itself built in the 50's over the shell of the property original to the site. Lots of clever architect reasoning behind it, I imagine, that legitimised the whole thing.

"an exemplar of how the 21st-century house can be incorporated into historic conservation areas as part of the continuing evolution of domestic architecture"

Talk like that, anything goes.