I wiped a house clean in the Imperial Temple District and came back three days later only to find the food had been respawned.

The owner, however, did not replace any books, wine, plates or utensils.

Will it take longer than three days for this to happen or does it happen at all?

If not, does anyone know of a mod that fixes this? It would be nice to have the stuff or even new things respawn.

Thanks.

Generally no, once an item has been taken, it won't be replaced. This is why clutter value is so low, they didn't want you cleaning out houses because those things can't be respawned normally without generating a vast amount of new forms every 3 days. Things in containers aren't given a formID until they are dropped (at which point they get an ID in the FF range), things placed in world have a formID related to what .esm or .esp they are related to. It's one of those things they did to prevent your game from going boom so fast because of all those FF addresses being used up (although the latest 1.2 patch solved the problem with too many IDs, there were no changes made to allow this sort of thing).

That said... Items in a cell outside of containers will only be replaced after the cell has been totally unloaded by the game (to make room to load other cells). This can take quite a long time to happen, and requires that you be nowhere near the cell (since nothing related to that cell should be refreshed), and instead actively exploring other parts of the world (can't just sleep). However this will have the added chance of also resetting any other interiors (like player houses), so probably shouldn't be used just so that you can get another 30 gold from cleaning a place out.