The Journal

Walk down almost any residential street and you can usually tell, within a few strides, which houses were shaped by an architect and which were merely extended. Scale and spectacle rarely explain it. Usually the giveaway is proportion: a window that lines up exactly where the eye expects it, a ceiling height that makes a modest room feel generous, a staircase that turns at the point where the light changes. This is the result of someone thinking hard, for months, about how a family will actually live in a space, and it's precisely this quality of thought that estate agents, surveyors and buyers alike have started to price into a sale.