Some stolen items are marked as furnishings. These can be placed in a home. But there's a big difference between creating a little thumbnail pic and a cute name for what amounts to a 100 gold token and creating a full 3 dimensional game object.

I was so bummed that they didn't take this route with the furnishing system. If you notice though, there is A TON of contraband in the game. They would have had to create so many new art assets for that kind of system and sadly they kind of took the copy/paste route with housing. On top of that, not everyone likes stealing so having the majority of nice furnishings being locked behind that particular content probably wouldn't have been received too well. Personally, I would have loved if in edition to the existing art assets they would have converted AT LEAST SOME of the contraband into unique furnishings. Especially the purple contraband items, those are so cool and a real shame they weren't converted into special trophies when laundered or something. Maybe one day, but I completely agree with you.