Ideas on Siding? Adv / Disadv to Stucco ?

We're not redoing our siding till next year (very low on priority list right now) But im 'shopping' for ideas...

Our neighbor down the block (Totally different style house) just did stucco and I DROOL WHEN I SEE STUCCO !!!! Anyone else LOVE STucco ??? Anyone have good or bad points to getting stucco done? Ive heard its very expensive so Im sure we'd do only the front (if even that was somewhat affordable) But I also heard its very high maintenance.
Any feedback on Stucco?


Also, we have a high ranch and it has the original siding, with the brickface on the bottom half.
High ranch owners-have any of you resided where you covered up/replaced the brickface with siding also? So as to give it one uniformed look? Our neighbors have white siding and simply painted the brick white. It looks very nice, but we're not sure we're going to do white...

Ideas?

Anna: I ABSOLUTELY LOVE Stucco We were thinking of doing it until we heard it's very high maintenance. After hearing that I started to really pay attention to the houses with Stucco that I would pass and saw that the Stucco on some (not all) houses had turned green in some areas or just looked plain dirty. I'm assuming that this doesn't happen over night, so it may be these owners had stucco put on a long time ago and never kept it up? Maybe they have something new now, that requires less maintenance?
As for price, we never researched it, but did hear it was expensive.

Good Luck