grammar - Past Perfect vs Past Simple

The following quotation is from Greg Egan's novel Permutation City:

The terrace house, one hundred and forty years old, was shaped like a cereal box. It had originally been part of a row of eight; four on one side had been gutted and remodeled into offices for a firm of architects; the other three had been demolished at the turn of the century to make way for a road that had never been built.

I'm wondering why the Past Perfect is so heavily used in the second sentence? I know that quite often P/Perfect and P/Simple can be used interchangeably:

The past perfect is neutral as regards the differences expressed by the past tense and present perfect. This means that if we put the events further into the past, they both end up in the past perfect...
When describing one event following another in the past, we can show their relation by using the past perfect for the earlier event, or else we can use the past tense for both, relying on a conjunction (e.g. after, before, when) to show which event took place earlier...
(Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik - A Communicative Grammar of English)

So, it seems the quotation from Egan's novel might be rendered as follows:

The terrace house, one hundred and forty years old, was shaped like a cereal box; two stories high, but scarcely wide enough for a staircase. Originally it was a part of a row of eight; four on one side were gutted and remodeled into offices for a firm of architects; the other three were demolished at the turn of the century to make way for a road that had never been built.

Is there any difference in meaning? Which of the variants seems better worded? I don't know English well enough to be able to assess such nuances. For my ear Egan's style sounds a bit heavy. He uses Pluperfect very intensively which results in phrases like this one, for one more example:

When he had asked for a package of results that would persuade “the skeptics” about the prospects for an Autoverse biosphere, he hadn’t been thinking of academics in the artificial life scene. He’d wanted to convince his clients that... and so on.

Why not put it simply?

When he asked for a package of results that would persuade “the skeptics” about the prospects for an Autoverse biosphere, he wasn’t thinking of academics in the artificial life scene. He wanted to convince his clients that...

What is your opinion?