An Unexpected Upside to Life in Post-Brexit London

They say that buying a house is one of the most stressful things you can do in life. In London, in the week that Britain voted to leave the European Union, an aphorism had seldom rung so true.

My partner and I had been renting for 15 years by the time the stars aligned for us to buy a place of our own, in the last days of June 2016. When the Brexit referendum vote dropped, shaking the British economy to its foundations, we hesitated. The London housing market, long buttressed by the globalizing forces that a majority of the country had just rejected, felt on the precipice of a reckoning. But, after a couple of days’ reflection, as it became clear that no one—least of all its architects—had the faintest idea how this Brexit thing would play out, we decided to trust to fate and press ahead.