I baked bread today, and it was a failure. I followed the recipe, used all the right ingredients, and still, the loaf collapsed.

Housing, too, can fail despite having all the right ingredients. Most new homes are built speculatively, based on yesterday’s tastes, with some imagined buyer years down the line. Developers try to follow the recipe, yet many projects miss the mark. From the empty condos on Billionaires’ Row in Manhattan to Levittown’s earliest postwar houses, the gamble is always the same: What will the market want tomorrow? Housing is a risky business, capital and labor intensive, and hostage to interest rates, tariffs, and above all, a fickle public.

Here in Fairfield County, we face an imbalanced market — too little inventory, too much demand. Yet even in these bullish conditions, not every project soars. The Mill in Westport and The Vue in New Canaan each took five years to sell out. Bankhouse in Westport moved faster, but even there, only two units were spoken for before construction was complete.

Today, 24 units are rising on Burtis Avenue, while just 100 feet away on Main, an equally large project has stalled in the final stages of approval. Too risky.

Downtown, a new house is listed for $3.895 million and has been on the market 108 days. All the ingredients are there. It’s a nice house, and I’m not casting judgment, but it raises the question: Does all new construction sell quickly? If not, why not? And if the market is strong, why do some builders stop building?

Like our governor, I’m trying to understand the prospects for new construction in New Canaan in a bullish market where not everybody wins. The first data point I look at is the price of the land beneath this house — $1 million in 2024.

I grew up hearing the rule of thirds, that the speculative house should cost three times the cost of the land. Today, when land and building costs have risen, can margins also rise? I think not.

Two hundred yards down the road, on Old Stamford, two lots just sold for $1.5 million each. Last week, a lot on Gower Road sold for $1,759,000. In the last decade, there have been 16 house sales on Gower Road, the most expensive being $2.98 million, and three sales above $2.8 million. Using the rule of thirds, can we expect a house for $5.25 million there?

The second data point buyers watch is price per square foot. The new home downtown is listed (incorrectly) at 6,624 feet, including a 1,859-foot basement that should not count, which pushes the price to $817 per foot above grade. By comparison, the five new houses currently on the market in New Canaan average $687 per foot, and the six new-construction sales in the past year had a median of $685 per foot. That’s a tight shot group. Those sales ranged from 6,000 to 8,600 square feet, on 1.07 to 2.55 acres, and averaged 69 days on the market. Two sold below the original asking price, three sold at asking, and one sold above.

I failed to proof my yeast, and the bread did not rise. Why do some houses sell immediately while others linger? Could this have been predicted? Was the recipe followed? It’s a perfectly acceptable house, aggressively priced, and there’s nothing exciting about it. And that’s by design. There is no room to color outside the lines in the design, construction, and selling of a spec home. The product is safe, the selling unimaginative, and it’s just a matter of price. Not so different really from a perfect loaf of bread.

If cooking is art and baking is science, what, then, is housing? In baking there’s no winging it, no dash of this or splash of that; the recipe works or the loaf collapses. Cooking, on the other hand, still celebrates creativity. The best chefs have become rock stars, fusing Indian and Chinese, Korean tacos, Vietnamese and French. Mashups thrive in the kitchen; mashups dominate the media. But there are no mashups in architecture anymore.

It seems to me that houses are going the way of the car industry. In a past column, I noted that most cars are white, and so are most houses. Now that we can study everything and assign it a number, we default to the recipe that works for the average, minimizing risk, stripping away artistry and design. Good for bread, not for houses. There are no more Harley Earls, who created the Corvette, or Lee Iacoccas, who gave us the Mustang. Driving the highway today, I can barely tell cars apart except for their logos. Designed by committee, they all look the same. And like our cars, our houses are starting to look alike. Developers, beholden to banks and formulas, leave little room for originality.

Maybe it’s inevitable in housing. The stakes are high, the land is expensive, and the margins are tight. Developers are beholden to their banks, following formulas in search of guaranteed success.

An algorithm can crunch the facts — square feet, acreage, bedroom count — and spit out a price. But for all our artificial intelligence, we still have no tool to measure artistry and design, or what they’re truly worth. I’m often asked: what is it worth that a Philip Johnson or a Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house? The only way to answer is by looking at comparable sales. If a Philip Johnson in New Canaan sells for a million more than a similar house, how much of that premium comes from good design, and how much from the fact that it is the original, unique art object?

That question is being tested now, as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian designs are being licensed to a modular home company. How much more will the public pay for a Wright-branded design compared to the originals built in the 1950s?

I am trying to value the best of a thing — the very best house designed by a famous architect. Can we place a premium on design, and if so, how much?

We can look up the basic facts online — bedroom and bathroom count, square footage, acreage — but we learn little about a three-dimensional object from photos. You can’t know how a house feels inside unless you walk through it. Even neighborhood data like walkability or crime statistics are easy to find, but most of my clients already know those numbers, and don’t care.

We glean our best clues from the listing description. It is the one place where the Realtor can say how the house feels, but too often we let the opportunity pass, reducing it to a list of rooms. Any Realtor can tell you which house is the most expensive, but ask 10 which is the best house in town and you’ll get 10 different answers.

Here’s a riddle. How is a great house more like wine, and how is it like whiskey? Pappy Van Winkle might be the world’s greatest whiskey. Like houses in New Canaan, I can’t always tell you what’s best — only what’s most expensive. Pappy sells for $7,000 to $15,000 a bottle on the secondary market, thirty times the price of other great whiskies. The same is true of first-growth Bordeaux like Château Lafite Rothschild or Château Margaux, which can sell for $10,000 a bottle — again, thirty times more than their peers.

But no house in New Canaan sells for thirty times another. The very best house here might command a premium of 50% or maybe double, but never thirty-fold. Housing is constrained by square feet, land value, comps, and banks. The market enforces boundaries.

And yet, like wine, houses are extraordinarily subjective. Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir — each appeals to its own sliver of the population. The same is true of architecture. There is still a place for ranches, for midcentury moderns, for Mediterraneans and Federals. So why, in New Canaan, do we build so many colonials?

Housing straddles the line between commodity and art. It is priced like a commodity — dollars per foot, acres per lot, beds and baths per unit — but its worth also depends on taste, design, and originality. The risk for developers is assuming the formula is enough. The opportunity for buyers is recognizing when artistry deserves a premium. Bread follows a recipe, cars follow a committee, but the best houses stand apart. And in a market built on averages, it is still the rare, the original, the best of a thing that commands the highest price.

When I list the best of a thing shortly, will you notice, and will you pay for it?

John Engel is an agent on The Engel Team at Douglas Elliman. Right now he is watching 21 acres, just 12 minutes from New Canaan, sit at under $500,000, while a 200-year-old antique on 6 acres appraised at $1.5 million heads to auction — proof of just how unpredictable this market can be.

Check out John Engel’s Podcast, Boroughs & Burbs, the National Real Estate Conversation here.

Read this article on the New Canaan Sentinel website here.