Selling
Selling a designed house without losing what makes it worth buying
Architecturally specific houses reward a specific kind of sale. Most of the value is won or lost before the first photograph.
Ines Doray6 minute read
A house built to a brief has a smaller natural audience than a house built to a market. That is not a weakness — it is the reason it is worth what it is worth — but it does mean that selling it well is a different exercise from selling a comparable volume of accommodation nearby.
Assemble the record before anything else
Drawings, specifications, commissioning certificates, warranties, the maintenance history, and the names of the trades. Buyers at this level are not asking whether the roof leaks; they are asking whether the house was thought about. A complete record answers that in an afternoon.
Photograph the house it is, not the house it resembles
We shoot on this coast twice for every sale: once in the best light the house was designed for, and once in ordinary weather. The second set is the one that converts. A buyer who has already seen a house look unremarkable and still wants to visit is a buyer who will complete.
Resist the empty-house instinct
- Leave the furniture that was designed for the room, and remove the rest
- Do not repaint a considered colour to something safer
- Fix what is broken; change nothing that is merely specific
- Keep the garden as it is planted, particularly on dune and cliff
The buyer for a specific house is looking for exactly that house. Sanding the specificity off it does not widen the audience; it simply makes the house harder to recognise.
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