For Robert Adam, one of Britain’s leading traditionalist contemporary architects, the explanation is simple: most homeowners seem to share Prince Charles’s preference for conservative architecture.

“Why would you want your home to be experimental and different?” he asks. “Tradition is very important in people’s lives. Modernity as an idea of being up to date and therefore deliberately different is not attractive to anybody buying a home, because it’s like showing off or being different. Most people don’t want to be different and they don’t want to show off.”

Albert Hill, director of The Modern House, an estate agency that specialises in selling contemporary property, concedes that the potential market for contemporary houses is smaller than the one for traditional ones. But, he says, the reason such unique houses often fail to find a buyer is that they are, by definition, one person’s idea of property perfection. “Nobody wants to live in someone else’s dream,” he says. “And when someone puts their heart and soul and blood and sweat into a house, they may have an inflated sense of its value and its design value.”

What does a modern house need to succeed? “If you want proper money, it’s going to have to appeal to the connoisseurs,” Hill says. “It needs to have had an innovative and proven architect. Modern design is not a ‘by numbers’ game, and that’s where a lot of people get it wrong.”

Setting can also make a difference, says Tim Stephens, director of Chesterton Humberts’s Norwich office, which is selling Barrington’s property. “If this house was in the home counties or on the north Norfolk coast, it would have flown,” he says.

The fact remains, however, that a lot of people might simply not be interested. As Adam says about the Grand Designs phenomenon: “Kevin McCloud will claim that lots of people want contemporary buildings because a lot of people watch this programme. Well, a lot of people watch Porridge, but it doesn’t mean they want to be in prison.”

- Woods End is for sale with Chesterton Humberts; 01603 661199, chesterton.co.uk; woodsendnorfolk.co.uk

Old-fashioned values: projects that took the classic approach

Hidden from view in a centuries-old quarry on the edge of Winchester, in Hampshire, the imposing green-oak and red-brick facade of Chalk Dell House emerges as if from nowhere. Set in two acres of mature gardens and landscaped lawns, the house looks as if it has been there for more than a century.

“It’s incredible to think we built this only five years ago," says Steve Skilton, 51, who sold his internet business for £32m and has since spent several million pounds building the house of his dreams. Although the nine-bedroom property includes state-of-the-art features such as underfloor heating, sophisticated energy-saving devices and a £500,000 swimming pool with a retractable solar-powered roof, it is all behind an Arts and Crafts-style facade.

Not that Skilton has anything against modern architecture. “There’s a place for everything,” he says, “but I’m a fan of Prince Charles on this subject. I think there’s a natural structure people understand in homes they want to live in."

Indeed, the ease with which Skilton and his wife, Sally, 49, gained planning permission for the house, which has a dramatic 49ft-high domed oak orangery, suggests such a view is widely held. “I sold the idea to the council of a house based on Lutyens’s buildings and gardens modelled on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs,” he adds.

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