Indeed. While some ideas are the same everywhere, the maximum size of a house in Europe will probably be under 2000 sqft, the fixtures will be very different (e.g. door knobs or handles?), the technologies will be different (heating for example: floor pipes vs. radiators vs. air ducts) and so on.
Plots of land with services and outline planning permission are super expensive if not just unavailable in most places.
You can't get a mortgage on a self build so you best have a couple of hundred thousand lying around or risk taking a bridge loan from a bank which puts enormous pressure on you to finish as soon as possible as that interest is eating up your capital.
You have to have somewhere else to live in the mean time, which combined with possible interest or just delays due to weather etc constantly puts cost pressures on you.
It's an unbelievably impractical dream for mostly everyone.
> You can't get a mortgage on a self build so you best have a couple of hundred thousand lying around
True, though there _are_ options. A family friend added 2000 sq ft to his family home (which had been 800 - and not excessive, they had three kids in a 2br home). He is a general contractor and works for a home construction company.
Granted that was a "renovation" - well, almost all new construction. He planned on doing almost all of it himself, except for plumbing/electrical, so anticipated very little labor costs. The bank made them take a loan for the market value of the work including labor, on the guise of "if you get injured, you need to be able to pay to complete it", but allowed the setting of milestones where they could repay labor costs out of the loan.
It's usually possible if you are in small towns to contact local construction companies, see what/where they are planning to build (usually semi-detached or row houses) and customize the inside (plan and fixtures) as much as possible. It's really hard to do it without an architect with so much less space available, but even then you still have a lot of freedom.
