A House in February

The shutters are closed along the whole of the shore. Four out of five restaurants are shut and the ones that are open are feeding twelve people who all know each other. The ferry timetable has thinned to something that requires planning. The gardens are closed, the boats are out of the water and up on trestles under canvas, and the villages have shrunk back to the people who actually live in them, which in some of the prettier hamlets is a very small number indeed.

It is also, on the right day, the most beautiful the lake gets. February here is not deep winter in the alpine sense: it rarely freezes hard at lake level, and snow at the water's edge is an event rather than a season. What it is instead is damp, still and extraordinarily quiet, with fog that sits on the water in the morning and burns off at eleven into a light so clear that you can see individual houses on the opposite shore two miles away.

For an owner, though, February is not an aesthetic proposition. It is the month in which the house is doing whatever it does when nobody is watching, and what it is doing is dealing with water. Not water coming in through the roof, although that too. Water in the air, at eighty or ninety per cent relative humidity for weeks at a stretch, in a building made of cold stone, with no heating on because the family are in London and there is nobody to heat it for.

Everything expensive that happens to a house on this lake begins in these four months, and almost none of it is visible in June. This is the argument for the whole apparatus of winter management that owners resent paying for, and it is worth setting out what it is actually preventing.

The mechanism is simple and unforgiving. Air holds moisture; the amount it can hold falls sharply as it cools. In an unheated stone building the wall surfaces are the coldest thing in the room, and they stay cold, because half a metre of masonry has an enormous thermal mass and takes weeks to change temperature. When damp air touches a cold wall, it deposits its moisture on it. That happens invisibly, continuously, and preferentially in the places with the least air movement: behind wardrobes, in the corners of the north-facing rooms, inside cupboards, under beds, behind pictures.

What follows is a sequence every property manager on this lake could recite. First, a smell. It is the particular closed-house smell that owners arriving at Easter describe as musty and cannot locate. Then bloom on leather: shoes, book bindings, the spines of a library, the arms of a chair. Then mould on textiles, starting with anything containing natural fibre and anything that was put away not quite dry. Then the plaster itself, which goes from cold to damp to soft, and the paint film, which begins to lift at the base of the wall.

Meanwhile the joinery is moving. Shutters swell and then bind so they cannot be closed properly in April. Doors that fitted in September will not shut in March. Old floorboards cup. Anything veneered lifts at the edges, and the furniture in these houses is frequently veneered. And in the rooms with a piano, which is a surprisingly high proportion of Lake Como villas, the instrument is having a bad time that will cost more to correct than the heating would have cost.

The insects arrive on the back of all this. Silverfish want damp paper and damp starch. Clothes moths want undisturbed wool in a dark cupboard, and a closed house between November and March is exactly the environment they have been waiting for. Woodworm is active in damp timber and dormant in dry. None of these are exotic problems and all of them are consequences of the same underlying condition, which is a cold building full of still, wet air.

There is no clever solution to any of the above. There is a routine, it is unglamorous, and the houses on this lake that are in good order after fifty years are the ones where somebody has done it every year without being interesting about it.

Heat, low and continuous, is the first element. Not to a temperature anyone would find comfortable. The point is not comfort, it is keeping the wall surfaces above the temperature at which the air deposits its moisture on them. A house held gently warm all winter costs a fraction of what the alternative costs in repairs, and the owners who discover this are usually the ones who tried the alternative first.

Air movement is the second, and it is more important than most owners believe. Interior doors propped open, wardrobes left ajar, furniture pulled a hand's width off the outside walls, and somebody opening the house up on the dry days, which do exist, and which are why the fortnightly visit needs to be by a person rather than a timer. Dehumidifiers help in specific rooms, particularly cellars and anywhere below ground, but they are a supplement to air movement rather than a replacement for it.

Then the visit itself, which is the whole system. Somebody walking through every fortnight, opening everything, running every tap for two minutes so the traps do not dry and the smell of the drains does not come up, flushing the lavatories, checking the boiler is still lit, looking at the ceilings under the roof after heavy rain, and putting hands behind the furniture on the north wall. It takes an hour. It is the cheapest line in the ownership and it is the one owners cut first.

The first is in the pipes. A properly closed house is either heated enough that nothing freezes or drained down, and the decision between those two positions should be made deliberately rather than by default. At lake level a hard freeze is uncommon, but these houses are not all at lake level, and a villa two hundred metres up the hill is in a different climate from the one on the water. An unheated bathroom on an outside wall in an exposed house is where the burst happens, and a burst pipe in a building nobody visits for three weeks is the single most destructive event available here.

The second is off the roof, and the villain is the chestnut wood above the property. Chestnut leaves are large, leathery, and they come down in November in enormous quantity; they block gutters, they block the channels that take water around a building on a steep site, and they turn to a mat in the outlets. Every serious property on this lake needs its gutters cleared after the leaf fall and again in February, and the reason is that on a slope, water that cannot get away goes into the building or under it.

The third is from the hill. A house cut into a steep slope has ground water moving behind and beneath it all winter, and the drainage that manages this, which is French drains, channels and the gaps in the dry-stone terrace walls above, is invisible, unglamorous and mostly Victorian. When a terrace wall bellies out after a wet winter it is almost always because water is standing behind it, and the wall is not the problem, it is the symptom.

The fourth is the lake, which moves. It is a regulated body of water and it goes down in the winter and up in the spring, and the low winter level is the moment when the base of the quay, the underside of the landing stage, the sill of the boathouse and the foot of the lake wall are visible and reachable. Anyone who has an eye on those structures inspects them in February for exactly that reason, and any work on them is scheduled then, because for the rest of the year they are under water.

The lake in February has a population you never meet in July, and it is the population that keeps everything standing. The custodi, who live in the lodges. The housekeepers, who are airing four houses on a rota. The gardeners, who are pruning olives and rebuilding a stretch of terrace wall because this is the only time of year they can get at it. The boatyards, which are at their busiest because every wooden boat on the lake is in a shed. The builder who cannot get scaffolding onto a lakeside property in August and therefore does all his work between January and March.

This is the fact that owners find most counter-intuitive: the trades on this lake are not idle in the winter, they are at capacity. The winter is when the work happens, because the houses are empty, the roads are clear, the gardens are dormant and the lake is low. A job booked in October gets done in February. A job requested in April gets done next February, or gets done badly in the middle of somebody's holiday.

The villages themselves contract. The place with nine restaurants has one, and it is full of people who have known each other since school. The bar opens at six for the men going to work and shuts when they have gone home. In the smaller waterfront hamlets there is genuinely almost nobody, which is fine until something goes wrong, and is the practical argument for owning in a village with a year-round population rather than in the prettiest bay on the lake.

You also see the shape of the place properly for the first time. Without leaves, the hillsides show their terracing, and you realise that what looked like woodland is an abandoned agricultural landscape with walls running through it in every direction. Without visitors, you see how small the villages actually are. And without the summer haze, the mountains at the top of the lake stand up behind everything with snow on them, which in August you would not know were there.

Every owner we have persuaded to spend a fortnight here in the winter has come back with a better set of decisions than they went out with. The house tells you things in February that it will never tell you in July: which rooms are cold and why, where the light does and does not reach, what the road is like in the wet, how long it actually takes to get anywhere when the ferry is running four times a day, and whether you have bought a summer house or a house.

It also resets what the place is for. Without the boats and the terraces and the lunches, what is left is a landscape of extraordinary severity: grey water, black hills, snow on the tops, a church bell, a heron on somebody's jetty. It has almost nothing to do with the version sold in the summer and is, to a certain kind of person, considerably better. Nobody arrives at Lake Como in February by accident, which means the people you meet there have chosen it.

Practically: bring layers rather than coats, because the buildings are cold and the outdoors is often mild. Expect fog in the morning and clarity by noon. Check the ferry timetable rather than assuming, because a crossing you take for granted in July may not run at all. Book the one restaurant. And light the fire in the afternoon rather than the evening, because a stone room takes four hours to come up to temperature and the point at which it does is about the moment you would otherwise have been going to bed.

And take the boat out, if there is one still in the water, on the first flat morning after the fog lifts. There will be nobody else on the lake at all. That is available for about eight weeks a year and it is the strongest argument we know for owning something here rather than visiting it.