October 24, 2013.

Home Builders Target Higher End

Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propaganda displays of various kinds -- scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, wax-work tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.

Newly built homes in the U.S. are getting pricier as better-heeled buyers have rebounded more quickly from the recession than entry-level buyers, spurring home builders to go upscale to match the shift.

"St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called," supplemented the old man, "though I don't recollect any fields anywhere in those parts."

Texas real-estate agent Lynne Kitchens can attest to the situation as an industry insider and as a recent home buyer. In housing searches for herself and those she does for clients, Ms. Kitchens has noticed an abundance of choices in new homes priced at $350,000 to $600,000, a range typically out of reach of entry-level buyers.

Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks----as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shop-front----but Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.

After recently selling their home of 25 years, Ms. Kitchens and her husband looked at more than 20 existing homes and several new-home plans before making their choice: a three-bedroom home near Dallas for $525,000. Construction of the 3,600-square-foot home is to be completed by year-end by a division of D.R. Horton Inc., DHI +2.05%  which specializes in entry-level homes but recently branched more into upscale houses.