These are a few of the many architectural visualizations I did for a custom home builder in Houston Texas about 12 years ago (circa 2000).

Each render took about a week to create. I worked off of the blueprints, and everything was done precisely to specs. This is back when I was still kind of new to 3D. As such, while my actual modeling skills were well along, my texturing and lighting still needed work. The top/first image is my favorite. I used a global illumination rendering plug-in called Final Render to get a fairly photo-realistic quality to it. The one thing that I would go back and fix (if I were so inclined to torture myself like that) would be the grass. Too uniform in color. All models were built in 3D Studio Max.