Removing Architectural Features Reduces Your Home's Value

It's remarkable to me that sometimes people will do something to their house that they thought would make it look good or seem more valuable, but as a matter of fact will reduce the value of a home.

When my wife and I were looking for a house to buy over a year ago, we made an offer on this house in Merced Heights:
http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/223-Vernon-St-94132/home/828698

Even though Merced Heights is basically considered being in the middle of nowhere in San Francisco, the main reasons I liked it was
a) it was cheap relative to most houses in San Francisco - listing price was under $500,000 - and
b) because it's on top of a hill, it has incredible views of the surrounding neighborhoods in San Francisco and of the Pacific Ocean. 

This was a house built in 1956, but definitely needed a lot of work done on it.  But given it seems like anything from the 1950s is all the rage now and becoming known as historic, this house had some interesting exterior architectural features of that era: thin angular decorative supports/slats, decorative wood window shutters, original windows. The theme of vertical lines is supposed to accentuate the geometry of the house. 

At the time, we lost the bid on the house (in fact to a all-cash bid that was tens of thousands of dollars lower than our bid), but my wife was really disappointed because she thought whoever bought the house might not appreciate the house's historic features and would probably rip everything up.  I thought this was a bit of a cynical thought, but turns out she was right...  Before and after:

They took out all the cute features that I just described, and now it's just another boring boxed house!  Unbelievable what these new owners did to reduce the value of their new home.

Knowing this, they probably messed up the other cool features inside the home.  Original fireplace:

Original bathroom wall tiling:

The house also had original 1950s metal kitchen cabinets, though not in great shape.