My advice would be to always start with a small house. Both Captain Margaux's Place and Autumn's Gate would be fine. Depends on whether a garden is important to you.
Housing is an expensive hobby, and after furnishing a small house, you'll know for sure if this is the addiction for you.

For furnishings you will roughly spend the same amount of gold as the house you bought, so it's better to start small when you're just beginning.

Not waste my time on it, especially if one just plays for fun.

Without an active sub, the item cap for homes is not worth the effort. Even with a sub, the item count is way too small for everything except the small homes, and maybe those medium ones that do not have a separate yard.

Furnishing homes takes ridiculous amount of either money or time. You will either be spending millions in gold to buy the stuff you need, or you will be spending days and weeks in endless farming to get all the resources needed. Or just spend that time grinding gold, which you will end up doing anyways, due to the horrendously low drop rates.

If you have 53k gold, then you are about 10% in from having a decently furnished small home. A decent looking medium home can easily swallow 3-4 million gold to get furnished, and getting one of the mansions looking all nice and cool will easily cost you 20 million gold. Even if you craft everything yourself, it will still have a hefty price tag involved, for those furnishing plans and materials do not come cheaply. Even if I want to craft a particular purple furnishing, it may make more sense to just sell the plan and buy the piece from a guild store. This is especially true for Morrowind, Summerset or Dwemer purples. I sold a bookcase plan for something like 500k gold and then ended up buying 7 or 8 of those bookcases from a guild store. AT 8-10k a pop it still made lot more sense to sell the plan to a collector, especially since those bookcases had a materiel cost of something like 3k anyway.

You can, of course, always skimp on the cost and go with crappy looking low end furnishings, but if you end up with a home that is ugly, uninspiring and has nothing in the way of giving it character, then why bother with it in the first place? It's not like houses have any real function in this game. Some people buy them just to get free teleport locations on the map and never bother furnishing them. The only real point for them is to create personalized designs that fit your character and your personal taste, and act as a way of personal expression, but doing that will require lot of time, effort, and gold.

Buying a furnished house with crowns tends to be an even worse idea. They have boring generic interior designs and usually come loaded with crappy junk you don't really want. The only reason to buy a furnished home with crowns is, if that particular home comes with stuff that is hard to come by, or is crown exclusive anyway and the bundle saves you some crowns, and assuming that you actually do want them in your home.

The thing is, that housing is an endgame activity. It's a massive gold sink designed to funnel millions of gold per player, away from the economy, and to work as a way that encourages people to use real money to bypass the grind. If you do not routinely do crafting writs on 4 to 8 characters each day, or have some other reliable way of making at least 25k a day, then housing is not gonna be a worthwhile experience for you. You're much better off by spending that time doing something else. Or you must be willing to throw hundreds of euros or dollars at the game.

If you are still adamant about at least fiddling with it, then buy a small house and take your time with it. Furnish it with whatever stuff you come across in your adventures. Learn the blueprints you find, and level up one characters crafting skills to make them. Buy achievement furnishings that look cool or meaningful to your character as you unlock them, and keep an eye on what the luxury vendor offers each week. You can take advantage of the few ESO+ free periods to furnish your home above the usual limit and end up with a characterful and personal looking abode.

Once you've done that, you'll either know if the process is worth the hassle or not, and whether you are willing to commit to the grind necessary to create a truly spectacular home in this game. And by that stage you'll also probably be at a point where 50k gold starts to feel like chump change to you, so dumping 10 million gold into a home no longer feels like an impossible proposition.

As to whether the homes you mentioned are worth buying? Well... That depends. Do you like them? That is the most important question. Do not buy a home that you don't like. The location is the next big one - is there a wayshrine nearby, or other useful services? What alliance is your character, and is the house located in "enemy" territory? And for me at least, an important thing to consider, is whether the exterior and interior match. The larger the house is, the more the interior tends to deviate from it's exterior. Now some people may not care, but some of us find things like that really distracting.

Captain Margaux's Place and Autumn's Gate are both decent homes in my opinion, and both have interiors that match the exteriors fairly well. Margaux's is smaller and easier to furnish without ESO+, and has enough height that it's fairly easy to build a second floor inside it if you want. It's also located in a city and not too far from a wayshrine. Autum's gate, being noticeably larger, could really benefit from the larger slot count of ESO+, especially since it also has a yard. On the plus side of things, it does come with a yard. On the downside though, it is located kinda in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing close by is a wayshrine.

Mathiisen manor on the other hand has issues. First of all, the interior and the exterior do not match. The shapes are similar, but the details are not. Windows are in wrong places as are the chimneys.The most aggravating thing about that is, that with a little bit more care and effort, these issues could've been easily avoided, if the people doing the layout for housing at ZOS had paid just a little bit more care about what they were doing.

There are also external structures you can't enter, and not being able to utilize the side tower on the front yard is especially annoying. Finally there are third floor structures on the main building that do not exist inside. Furthermore, the layout of the place is really impractical, and makes hard to create separate spaces inside it. Especially on the second floor. No master bedroom in this building. Finally there is no backdoor on the first floor, which makes accessing the backyard pretty difficult.

Another thing to keep in mind is, that the place is actually a large home, despite it being called manor, which means it has an item cap of 300/600, and that is way too low for a place that big. Especially with the large exterior space.

On the plus side though, it is a rather cool and impressive looking place, and lot more high elven (at least in my mind), than anything offered in Summerset. The location is kinda bad though. It's fairly far away from a wayshirne and Mathiisen doesn't offer much in the way of services.

If you do want it though, I strongly urge you to not waste crowns on it. Furnishing it is going to take a lot of gold anyway, and the one million and change price tag is going to pale in comparison what it will cost to furnish it properly. Until you are in endgame and making gold becomes easy, there is no point in wasting resources on a place you can't really do justice anyway.

Even if you have surplus crowns at hand, it's much better idea to us them to buy some cool time limited special furniture pack to really spice up the place, than use them to get the base house itself. And buying it furnished is not a good idea anyway - while it comes with tons and tons of items, most of them are in the base game Altmer style, and those are not all that hot. If you do get Mathiisen, I'd imagine you'd be more interested in decorating it with Summerset stuff rather than base game pieces.

The furnished version does come with plenty of crowns only furnishings, but even with all of them added together, it still makes more sense to just buy the place with gold and buy the crown exclusive things separately. Especially when the bulk of that price is made up from the 8 crowns only exclusive painting, of which half are the same painting. Makes much more sense to just spend those crowns in buying 8 different paintings.

But that's just my take on things, I'm sure there are those who will disagree with me.

Twin Arches was my first house as a non-sub and as a AD character. I had to do Cadwell’s Gold to get it but it was totally worth it. The courtyard makes a great place for target dummies and the little patio can hold at least the woodworking, blacksmithing, clothing, and enchanting crafting tables.

I like Autums rest. I think it’s the best low cost home. I got the dawn light palace free during the event but I still the AR.

I'm a relatively new player and for me house owning and furnishing/decorating is one of the big draws for me. The long reply that has been posted makes some interesting points but is unnecessarily negative, imo. It is true that house owning is a gold/crown sink but if it brings you pleasure that, after all, is the point of the whole gaming exercise!

You get a LOT more value for money going the gold route rather than crowns when it comes to houses and furniture, so I would suggest exchanging some of your monthly sub crowns for gold (see the Tamriel Crown Exchange) on the recruiting forum on here. Don't buy a house for crowns unless you really love the furnishings. Most of the time you're much better off, and will have more fun, buying a house with gold and furnishing it yourself. Get the Tamriel Trade Centre add on if you're on PC and become a discerning shopper - you can find most of what you want in guild stores and TTC will help you find the stuff at the best prices. Prices vary wildly...for example this morning I bought a recipe I needed for 27 gold that was listed at 400-1200 gold everywhere else.

Autumn's Gate is a nice starter home and I would 100% agree with what other people have said, which is take your time, expect to take a few months to get it exactly as you want it and enjoy the process. Regarding Capt Margaux's Place in Daggerfall, I'd suggest that an alternative would be to start a new character that's one of the Daggerfall Covenant races and go immediately to Daggerfall and get your free room at The Rosy Lion Inn. If you know anyone in game ask them to give your new char a lift to the Daggerfall wayshrine or ask in zone chat if someone would help you out.

Anyway, enjoy becoming a person of property - you might seriously get the bug and get motivated to get more into crafting!

The other bonus to Autumn's Gate is it's one of the few homes that come with the flaming fireplace logs with the unfurnished version - so you don't have to either spend crowns or build your own which wastes some slots.

I have the 3 free inn rooms from all 3 alliance factions, which are basically used as free ports from anywhere I am at to those areas. They are free, so make an alt for each faction and go get them, there is no reason not to have them unless you don't like making alts. >.> The only other one I have is Flaming Nix (for it's convenience to everything).

Well the thing is - I'm gonna get ESO Plus shortly - that comes with 19,800 crowns. SO....I have $63K gold and counting. What I'm thinking is Hunding Palace and either Quondam Indorilia or Old Mistveil Manor. 1 east 1 west. Both kinda central. I generally prefer residences that look out over water, Ald is on a harbor but doesn't have direct views. IDK....waste of coin?

deadsheepb14_ESO wrote: »

I have the 3 free inn rooms from all 3 alliance factions, which are basically used as free ports from anywhere I am at to those areas. They are free, so make an alt for each faction and go get them, there is no reason not to have them unless you don't like making alts. >.> The only other one I have is Flaming Nix (for it's convenience to everything).

You don't have to have a character in each faction to obtain the inn room. You can purchase the ones in the other starting cities for a few thousand gold each which is what I've done. Yes they make great free port locations.