Would strongly disagree with this.

For me a well designed house is actually, you know, about the design. And whilst the construction is important due to standards it is largely irrelevant.

The analogy to software is apt. Well designed, well architected software is so important. Anyone can write syntactically proper code. Far harder to design a system that has just the right amount of extensibility, performance, elegance etc to meet the requirements without going over the top.