In the past couple of years we sold one house, worked for months on a house design to build a house and then decided to buying an existing house that was about 6 years old. I can say that I agree with the article that kitchen and master bath were important to the prospective buyers of our house and to use in building or buying a house.
As a seller - our master bath was fine. It had cultured marble countertops and we were advised to change them to granite for resale. I was surprised to find that it only cost $600 to do it and so improved the room. We had a huge bathroom (larger than some secondary bedrooms in our current house) and people generally liked it. However, the kitchen while nice enough in terms of countertops and such didn't have a breakfast room (we had put in a small breakfast bar) and that was a deal breaker for a lot of lookers. The kitchen was a big part of what made the house hard to sell. It also wasn't huge (smaller actually than the master bathroom) in a 4500 SF house.
As someone wanting to build - Builders play these games. They give you a price based upon a standard kitchen for them. Around here that was usually a basic granite and maybe maple cabinets and lower end stainless steel appliances. To get a kitchen that you would actually want in a new house you had to upgrade pretty much everything. I spent a lot of time working out clearances and walk paths and storage, etc. Although we decided not to build I learned a lot just working on that kitchen design for months (and it was the centerpiece of the design)
As a buyer - Houses seemed to fall in a few categories. I knew I wanted a kitchen open to the living area. I made that something that I wasn't going to compromise on. So there were some houses we just ruled out based upon layout. Then I looked at the actual kitchens. There were kitchens that were just awful. They had cheap cabinets and counters of a material I didn't want. To me, I would maybe buy one of those but I would have to figure in what it would cost to basically gut the kitchen.
Then there were houses that weren't awful...but not to my taste. For example, there were houses that had granite but I hated the color. There was one house we almost bought where the kitchen counters were Corian (I didn't like it), the cabinets were not horrible, but not very good. The layout though was pretty good so we priced replacing the cabinets, countertop and all appliances.
The house we ended up buying had a great layout...almost exactly what I wanted. It had a huge kitchen with a great granite (actually the granite that I had in my office at my old house - Blue Pearl). The cabinets were...adequate. Not my first choice if I was building but they didn't make me cringe. It did have a prep sink, which I had never had before. At first we never used it. 11 months later, we use it constantly....
The master bath on the other hand has the dreaded cultural marble and an odd cabinet layout. However, the overall layout of the space is fine so we bought the house knowing we will eventually replace the vanities, linen cabinets and counters.
FWIW, DH always wanted us to buy a house that wouldn't require kitchen or bath remodeling. The agent said this was a common thing -- the husband doesn't want to remodel them going in, while the wife is bringing in contractors the day after closing....
