Using A Normalized (vertical) Table

I'm working on a couple projects and I've recently been trying to make everything fully normalized so updates are easier and I'm just wondering if there's a standard way to query and update normalized tables.

For example:

If I have table People with columns ID, FirstName, LastName, Height, Weight, ShoeSize, I can normalize that into two tables. Table People has ID, FirstName and LastName. Table PeopleDetails has PeopleID (FK), Property and Value. That way i can add more properties later right at the presentation layer if I like. Essentially I moved the data from being horizontal to being vertical.

But doing a simple search for people means I have to search the details table and return a LOT more records (one each for Height, Weight and ShoeSize) not to mention any more details I might add later. With a lot of details, it seems like your performance would take a big hit and your code would get really complicated as your looping through a vertical dataset to find the properties you want. Or is there some other standard way of doing that?

I'm just hoping that someone else has solved these problems and there's a standard set of functions out there for selecting and updating this kind of DB structure. Anyone?