You're absolutely correct. For the design of everyday things, we naturally want similar things to look similar in some way. The similarities can be surprisingly subtle, yet we appreciate them without being able to describe them.

Back in graduate school (at Carnegie Mellon), a fellow graduate student wrote his thesis on a study of architecturally similar Queen Anne style houses in Pittsburgh. He wrote a kind of grammar called a "shape grammar" to generate instances of these kinds of houses.

A good article he wrote he was kind enough to make publicly accessible:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23540603_More_than_...