Benefit: Oak doesn’t rust...
A lot of the holiday homes over in Italy are still built that way. Concrete or stone walls with stucco on the outside. Aluminum framed widows with roll down shutters.
Steel exterior doors with multiple locking points around the perimeter. Same with those Aluminum windows. They lock in multiple places around the frame. The roof is covered with clay or concrete tiles. Once those roll down shutters on the window are closed it is very difficult to break in. Yet, you can leave the window open to keep air circulating.
This makes is so you can close up the house and go back to the UK or where ever your full time home is located. Then no one is going to break in and steal all your stuff when you are not there.
My wife and I subscribe to a couple Italian real estate YouTube channels. One is called “A Home in Italy”. He is a expat Brit who now lives in Abruzzo. The province east of Rome on the Adriatic. He advertises these apartments and villas in a lot of the smaller villages(hill towns) that are about a 1/2 hour from the sea.
All of these places are OLD. Hundreds of years old. Almost all built prior to indoor plumbing and electricity. He will describe a shower as a “One Dave” shower based on its size. Or if widows actually are double glazed and have fly screens because those are modern inventions of the Twentieth Century.