How many Prims is considered low for a house?

In building houses, what number do you consider to be low in prims.
Obviously the lowest of low is pretty basic. But when you add doors and "extras' it goes up fast. I can only get it down to around 17 with 5 rooms and no features or doors.
It would be real helpful if you could texture each interior side of a cube separately so I find I have to make each texture to custom fit each piece which is not easy.


So what number do "you" considered low? 20 30 40?

I'd say any of the above is pretty low. A 512 parcel can hold 117 prims. 20-40 is just 17-34% of that amount. I don't think too many people would object to their house consuming that percentage.

Of course, the real answer to "what's low" is very dependent on the size of the structure. If it's a little 10x10 shed, then any more than a handful is a lot. If it's a full-sim palace, then anywhere in the thousands could be reasonable.

It is a tradeoff - textures against prims.

If you texture the walls to have windows, thus needing the transparency channel, then your buyer may run into problems with showing decorations and furniture also with transparency channels, interfering with the rendering - a known display bug.

On the other hand, if you use individual windows you either need a jigsaw pattern of prims around them or you need to open a hole in the wall which prepositions it.

In part, it depends on how flexible you want your house design to be. Some of the tricks that make a house REALLY low prim, like using textures for an entire wall (including windows) or hollowed cubes (to get more than one wall out of a single prim), make it impossible for the owner to redecorate; the wall textures are very complex, so it's not feasible for the owner to paint or wallpaper the walls. (That's why all the ultra-low-prim houses I've seen for sale are sold no-modify.) Entire-wall textures also give you a house with less detail than one where whatever textures used cover only a small area; compare (say) a shingled house where a shingle texture covers only 1 meter (used with repeats) to one where a single texture covers an entire wall.

I give away a 32-prim starter house. I consider that low, but not ultra-low; I'd consider under 20 prims ultra-low for a First Land house. The owner can take away four or five of those if they are willing to dispense with a few things. (I include a notecard telling how.) But that's using individual wall prims (allowing papering and wallpapering; it's a full-permissions house), as well as separate prims for the windows so they can be tinted. I think that my design is a reasonble tradeoff between detail and prim count, but other people might choose different points on the curve. Fewer prims in the house mean less detail but more prims availbable for furniture; more prims mean more detail but less furniture. As a home owner, you have to decide, based on your priorities for using your land.

This has been annoying the hell out of me. And it seems is the prime reason not to use complex textures on inside cubes or for windows. I will give up on doing that now.

The buyer needs some flexability, so the high twenties, low thirties would be a good number to aim for.
Thanks for the input.