After having a quick look at housing on the PTR, I feel like there’s a couple of issues that need addressing.
First, items bought from a vendor should go straight to your housing inventory instead of having to click them (I know this one has been brought up plenty of times)
Second, I feel like “basic” housing items shouldn’t need to be purchased to begin with. Things like interior walls, basic windows and doors, basic tables etc should just be free to place. It’s a pain having to drop what you’re doing, go through a loading screen, fly to the merchant, buy what you need, fly back, go through another loading screen just to finish off the basic structure you were working on. Purchasing more “fancy” things is fine, purchasing achievement rewards etc is fine, but basic structural stuff should just be free to place. At least then players can get started without constantly flying back and forth. I get it’s probably meant to be a gold sink, but it’s just annoying more than anything.
As an example, I saw the Elwynn Fence for sale at the Stormwind vendor. I thought that would be nice to fence in my house. How many do I need though? No idea, so I just spam clicked it for a while to make sure I had enough. That’s not a great design imo.
I think just buying it once to unlock it, then have it be free to place multiples of them would be a fair solution.
Following on with Elwynn Fence, I think Blizz could really take some pointers from the Planet games (Coaster and Zoo). Placing one piece of Elwynn Fence is fine, but then carefully finagling subsequent pieces to line up is a pain. In Planet Zoo, you can select one building piece, then use an “advanced duplicate” mode. This duplicates the piece in advanced move mode, on the same axis as the original. So you can just drag it along, and it perfectly lines up with the first piece. Something like this would be ideal.
Lastly, I really hope more external styles are coming soon. My plot is on a cliff in the Duskwood area, and it’s perfect for a gothic style mansion.