There is a reason we all don’t live in plain vanilla boxes. People care about where they live. We care about what our homes look like. We care about the floor plan and how it flows. But more importantly, we want an actual home to come home to – a place that feels like it’s our home because it encompasses everything that feels like a home to us. A home is so much more than just a roof over our heads and a place to live, it’s a haven to escape to after work, it’s where we raise families and entertain friends, and it’s where we live our lives.

As a brand-new homeowner and having just gone through the process of looking for a new home myself, my search started out as a challenge. I’m very specific; I know what I like and don’t like. And what I don’t like – cookie-cutter floor plans – seemed to be all I could find. In addition, I was looking only in a specific neighborhood. As Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, points out on page 9, architecture is just as much about the neighborhood a home is in as it is the building structure, and exterior and interior style. “Curb appeal and a sense of image in residential architecture has always had an enormous role when it comes to selling real estate,” he told us. “People buy homes for the neighborhoods, too, not just individual buildings.”

I started having doubts that I’d find something perfect for me. Having looked for a new home to call my own since February, I found some that were nice, but I didn’t have a real emotional connection to any. I couldn’t really see myself living in any one of them.

Then I found a place in a lovely three-flat building, with an open, seemingly special floor plan, high-end finishes and great views in the perfect location. It was love at first showing. It had a sense of being my home with every walk-through; I could see myself living there, and I needed to live there. I needed to buy that place. So I did, and I couldn’t be happier.

This is why architecture matters: finding out what your clients want to live in and showing them homes that ignite an emotional connection, a place they can call home for years to come, a place that they’ll love and love living in…that’s why architecture matters. If buyers fall in love with it, they’ll buy it – and several reasons buyers often fall in love with a home have to do with its architecture.

I hope you enjoy our cover story, which demonstrates how important architecture is to a real estate deal. And this is why architecture shouldn’t be an afterthought, or a forgotten fact when it comes to a deal – architecture matters to buyers.