Where to stay on Lake Como: choosing the shore before the house

People book a house on Lake Como the way they would book one anywhere: photographs, bedrooms, a pool. Then they arrive and discover that the terrace goes into shadow at two in the afternoon, or that the ferry they need leaves from the opposite shore, or that there is a long flight of steps between the car and the front door. Position governs a stay here far more than the specification does.

The first fork is aspect. The western shore faces east across the water and takes the sun on its frontage from the early afternoon until it drops behind the ridge behind the house. The eastern shore faces west, takes the sun early and low on the water, and loses direct light on its faades earlier in the afternoon. If your day begins slowly on a terrace with coffee, book the eastern shore. If it ends there with a drink and a view of the sun going down the branch, book the western.

The second is which part of the lake. The Como branch is narrow, steep and villa-lined, closest to the city and to the motorway, and it is where you stay if you want privacy, water access and a short transfer. Centro Lago, where the two southern arms meet at the Bellagio promontory, is the widest water and the best connected, and it is where you stay if you want to move around the lake without a car. The two behave so differently that a recommendation for one is close to useless for the other.

The third is what you intend to do with the days. A household that will spend most of them on the water wants a jetty and a sheltered approach far more than it wants a village. A couple who want to walk out of the door to dinner wants the opposite, and will be miserable in a beautiful house at the bottom of a long stair with nothing within reach of them.

The villages here are unusually clean answers to particular questions, and unusually poor answers to the others. It is worth being blunt about which is which rather than treating them as a ranking.

Bellagio is the most connected address on the lake and the one with the most life on foot: a genuine village, open through the winter, with the whole ferry network at the quay. It is also the busiest in the middle of the day between April and October, and if that would spoil it for you the answer is to stay slightly outside the centre rather than to go elsewhere. Varenna, across the water, is smaller and quieter, and it is the one with a station of its own.

On the western side, the Tremezzina shore is where the gardens are and where the afternoon light falls longest, which makes it the strongest base for a household taking a house with a garden and a boat, and a weak one for anyone who wants a town. Menaggio is the working town of the mid-lake, with a square, a promenade and services that stay open. Cernobbio and the city of Como are the shortest transfer from Milan and the easiest base to leave from at short notice.

Laglio, Torno, Blevio, Nesso and Lezzeno, the steeper and smaller places on either bank of the Como branch, are for a different kind of stay entirely: privacy, water, and very little else within walking distance. They are wonderful with a boat and a car and difficult without either. Each of these has a page here setting out what it is actually like; read the two that match your requirement rather than all of them.

The lake has grand hotels of real quality, mostly on the lower western shore and along the Tremezzina waterfront, and for two or three nights they are frequently the right answer: someone else solves the boat, the table and the transfer, and you are not responsible for anything. Below a certain length of stay the logistics of a private house outweigh its advantages.

Beyond about four nights the calculation reverses, and it reverses hardest for households. What makes this lake worth being on happens outside: a terrace at five in the afternoon, a boat at the bottom of the garden, breakfast under a tree, a kitchen you can cook a lunch in. A hotel gives you the view of that and a house gives you the use of it. It is also the only way several couples or three generations end up in the same place at the same time rather than in adjacent rooms.

The other difference is staffing, and it is not what people expect. A well-run private house here comes with people: a housekeeper, someone who knows the boat, a cook when you want one. The quality of that arrangement matters more to the week than the house does. A beautiful villa with nobody who knows how it works is a poor holiday. We have never once had a client regret spending on the staffing rather than on the extra bedroom.

For anything longer than a fortnight, or for anyone using the lake repeatedly, the honest question stops being where to stay and becomes whether to own. Our guides on buying and on the cost of ownership are the place to take that seriously.

The transfer from Milan is the part of a stay here that goes wrong most often, and it is entirely predictable from where you have chosen to be. Book the shore, then check the route; not the other way round.

If you are arriving by train, Varenna is the only village of its kind with a station of its own, Varenna-Esino-Perledo, above the village on the MilanLeccoSondrio/Tirano line. From there you walk down to the water and can cross to Bellagio, Menaggio or Cadenabbia by ferry. Como has two stations, Como San Giovanni and Como Lago, which serve the city and the shores immediately either side of it. No other western-shore village has rail at all.

If you are arriving by road, understand what the last leg involves. The western shore is served by the Strada Regina, which is narrow, tunnelled in places and the only through route on that bank; in high season it is the slowest part of any journey to the lake by a considerable margin. The eastern road north from Lecco is broader but carries commercial traffic and runs through long galleries. Either way, the map's distance and the actual journey are not closely related between June and September.

And consider arriving on the water for the last leg. Being met at a jetty rather than at the end of a road is not an indulgence on this lake so much as a solution to a specific problem, and for houses on the steep shores it is frequently the only sensible approach with luggage. Our guide on getting here from Milan sets out every route in detail.

A private jetty is the single feature that most alters how a stay here works, and it is worth understanding why before treating it as a luxury. It is not principally about the boat. It is that the water is the fast, empty, direct network on this lake and the roads are the slow, narrow, congested one, so a house you can leave from the bottom of the garden operates on a different lake from the house next door.

The practical effect is on lunch, and this is not a small thing. Owners here choose a table by wind and by light rather than by distance, cross to the other shore for it, and come back in the late afternoon with the sun behind them. Doing that from a road-access house involves a car, a place to leave it and a good part of the afternoon gone. Our journal piece on lunch by boat covers the geography of it.

Not all water access is equal and the particulars rarely say so. A jetty on an exposed stretch is unusable in a north wind; a sheltered bay is workable in almost anything. Deep water close in matters for a larger boat, and some shores have it while others shelve. If a boat is part of the plan, ask what the approach is like in weather rather than what it looks like in the photograph.

If you do not have your own boat, a skippered day at the start of the stay is the most useful thing you can arrange, particularly on a first visit. A morning on the water explains the lake better than days of driving round it.

Most of what goes wrong on a family stay here is architectural rather than logistical. These are steep villages and vertical houses: rooms are stacked, stairs are stone and often external, terraces have low parapets and long drops, and gardens are held on retained levels rather than laid out flat. With small children or with anyone unsteady on their feet, the plan of the house matters more than its size.

Ask specific questions and expect specific answers. How many steps between the parking and the front door, and between the front door and the water. Whether the garden is enclosed and at what level. Whether the pool is fenced. Where the nearest place is that a delivery vehicle can actually stop. Whether the kitchen is a working kitchen or a decorative one. None of these are unreasonable questions and all of them are difficult to answer from photographs.

Parking is the constraint people meet first and remember longest. Houses in the historic cores of the villages have none and there is nowhere for any to be built; residents' arrangements exist but are limited and often a walk from the door. If you are arriving with two cars and a quantity of luggage, establish where they will both go before you book, not on the day.

Staff make the difference between a house that works and a house that is admired. A housekeeper who knows the village, a boatman who knows the wind, and somebody who can produce lunch for nine at short notice will do more for a fortnight than any amount of specification. This is the part of a stay we spend most of our own time arranging.

Spring is the gardens, and on the western shore that is a genuine spectacle rather than a phrase. The sheltered east-facing slope holds camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons in quantity, and they are the reason to come in those weeks. The trade is unsettled weather, cold water, and a lake that is only partly open.

Summer is warm water, long evenings and the version of the lake everyone has seen. It is also hot, slow on the roads, and busy in the middle of the day in the best-known villages. Stay slightly outside the centres, plan around the water rather than the road, and the season is entirely manageable.

September and early October are the best weeks of the year here and the ones owners keep quiet about. The water has had all summer to warm, the light has lengthened, the gardens are still open, the roads have emptied and the kitchens are still working. If you can choose, choose this.

From November the lake contracts sharply, and where you stay stops being a preference and becomes the whole question. The towns that were never seasonal carry on: Como, Cernobbio, Menaggio. On the quieter shores a great deal closes, published opening hours become unreliable, and the eastern side of the Como branch spends much of the day in the shadow of its own mountains. Winter here is worth doing, but only with the base chosen for it.

The photographs were taken in June, at six in the evening, from the water. That is the honest explanation for most of the gap between expectation and arrival. Ask when the images were taken, ask for a photograph of the approach as well as the view, and ask what the terrace looks like at four in the afternoon in the month you are coming.

The road was not mentioned. On the western shore in particular, a great many otherwise excellent houses have the Strada Regina between the garden and the water, and a property that is silent in March is a different proposition on an August Saturday. It is a fair question and any good agent will answer it straight.

The boat was assumed. A house described as having lake access may have a shared slipway, a right of way across a neighbour's land, or a mooring some distance away rather than a jetty at the foot of the garden. Establish exactly what exists and how it is reached before you build the week around it.

And the last ferry. If you are staying on one shore and eating on another, the timetable is the constraint on the evening, it changes with the season, and it is shorter than people assume. Confirm it on the day rather than from anything published.