Instanced housing could be as varied and exciting as development budget will allow. Think of having 20+ different options (for different prices) when you purchase your instanced home - each with different building design, overall landscape theme and amenities (garden plots, stables, etc). They could feed into a "lobby" area that has things like MB and bell and housing related NPCs (things that you need to leave your current house to access in the wards now) to preserve a "community" gathering place.


The only thing that would be missing is the ability to show off your house to the general public and even that could be included (I'm thinking the ability to set "open house" to invite the public to tour your house, or to restrict access to those in your party, FC, LS, etc.). I think that would be a fair trade-off to enable EVERYONE that pays a subscription to have access to housing and all of the content that is gated behind housing (gardening, stables, workshop, airship ventures, etc).