Here's my Ashlands base if you're interested.

Hall interior (pre-furniture):

Hall interior (partially furnished; meeds more light sources, other bits and bobs)

Exterior:

Also, the Portal Stone allows you to teleport metals. I usually build temp ones at existing portal locations and just change portal designations if I need to transport metals. One of the best additions to the game, especially since having to navigate back to the Ashlands every time you needed iron or something would be terrrrible.

That's good. I actually built the first thing I was ever properly proud of in the Ashlands (before the roof fell off, anyway) and that was about my only good experience with the patch. Generally, the building and resource gathering in any game isn't interesting to me but grausten is such a cool material to work with. But the combat, exploration, and progression in the Ashlands are plain unpleasant IMO and those are usually the aspects of games that I enjoy most.