Welcome to Gaia! ::

I was originally based in Caldera, then I moved to Solstheim.

If you have the Bloodmoon part of the game, do the Factor's Quests and get the free house from that. It's pretty big and it has two floors. You're also given a room at the Thirsk Hall if you complete the quests for that, and you can acquire your own (small) house in the Skaal Village (there are quests to go along with that too, if you couldn't guess).

Those are the only "free" houses that I can think of, but you could always just murder the owner of a house that you deemed to be nice and use it as a weapons/armour/treasure cache.

Just join one of the great houses... gives you some pretty sweet quests, depending on the house, you get money, AND a house

The factors house sucks. I only use it to hold stuff I don't want to carry, but don't want to lose, or for a place to start hunting trips from (the snow bear spawn nearby is nice and there's a snow wolf spawn near there, I think northeast). If you have mark and recall, I'd suggest Yakanalit, an annoyingly hard place to find Azura's coast or the Ascadian Isles region. It's on a small island northwest of tel Branora, east of Mzanch ruin nearby. And since everyone knows about the mudcrab merchant near mzanch, there's another obvious benefit: cash whenever you need it.If dwemer ruins are your liking, any one of the 3 dwemer towers near Dagon fel are good, and I might also suggest Aleft in the bitter coast region. In the foyada near khuul there's a rogue telvanni base that has been cleared out by house redoran people, who are worse than the telvanni, with a hidden room the makes an excellent storage space. Other than that, not much except caldera or pelagiad.

If you're talking about Nedhela's house in caldera, that's imperial cult. But the basement is nice, isn't it?

Of course. It's morrowind, not oblivion.

Speaking of which, I finally got oblivion!