The Light on the Western Shore

Lake Como lies in a trench running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, with mountains rising steeply from both edges. Because of that, almost every house on it faces either broadly east or broadly west, and the difference between those two conditions is the largest single fact about living here. It is larger than the difference between villages, larger than the difference between the two southern branches, and considerably larger than most buyers appreciate on a June afternoon when everything is lit.

The western shore faces east: Cernobbio, Moltrasio, Laglio, the Tremezzina, Menaggio and everything between them. The sun arrives over the ridge on the far side of the water, which means the morning is the western shore's hour: the light comes across the lake horizontally, catches the pale render of the villas and turns the whole line of the shore the colour it is in photographs. Then the sun climbs, crosses overhead, and by the middle of the afternoon it has gone behind the mountains that rise directly behind those same villages. The shore goes into shadow while the sky is still bright.

The eastern shore does the opposite. Torno, Nesso, Lezzeno, Varenna and the eastern face of the Bellagio promontory start the day in the shadow of their own hills and are still fully lit when the western shore has gone blue and cool. If you stand at Punta Spartivento at eight in the evening in July you are watching precisely this: the western mountains black against the last of the sun, and the eastern shore opposite still holding warm light on its walls.

Neither aspect is better and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. They are different lives. East-facing means breakfast in the sun, a swim in warm morning water and a cool terrace by four, which in August is a considerable gift. West-facing means shade until mid-morning and then light on the terrace until nine at night, which is what most people mean when they say they want the sun.

In December the sun does not climb very far, and on a lake where the ground rises hundreds of metres directly behind the houses that has an effect people from flatter countries do not anticipate. The shadow line, the point on the slope above which the sun is still shining, sits much lower in winter, and it moves down the hillside earlier each afternoon. On certain stretches of shore, in certain weeks, it does not come down to the water at all.

This is not a rare or exotic condition. There are villages on both shores where direct sun is absent from parts of the waterfront for a period in midwinter, and the residents know exactly which weeks and speak about it the way other people speak about a rainy season. It is one of the reasons a house that is worth a great deal in June can be a difficult place to spend February, and it is completely invisible to anyone who has only seen the property in the summer.

The related effect is dampness, because sun on a stone wall is what dries it. A shaded elevation on a lakeside building through a still, humid, windless winter stays wet in a way a sunlit one does not, and it shows up as green on the north face, as moss on the terrace steps, as render failing at the base of a wall, and eventually on the inside. Owners of shaded houses spend money on this every year. Owners of houses that get four hours of winter sun mostly do not.

The practical instruction is simple and almost nobody follows it. Before you commit to a house on this lake, stand on its terrace at four in the afternoon in November, with a compass, and look at where the shadow line is on the hill behind. Then ask a neighbour, not the agent, which weeks the sun goes. You will get a precise answer, because everybody who lives here knows.

The distribution of the famous gardens on this lake looks like an accident of taste and is not. It is a map of the microclimate. The lake widens considerably at its centre, and the stretch of western shore that faces that widening, where the mountains behind step back a little and the water in front is broad, collects more sun through the year and is sheltered from the worst of the cold air draining off the northern valleys. It is not a coincidence that this is where you find the concentration: Villa Carlotta, Villa del Balbianello on its promontory, and the run of gardens through the Tremezzina.

What that microclimate buys is a planting palette that has no business being at this latitude with the Alps visible behind it. Camellias flower here in late winter. Azaleas and rhododendrons, which want acid soil and cool roots and a mild spring, do extremely well. Citrus survives with cover. Palms and cypress and magnolia stand alongside chestnut and beech in a combination that is genuinely peculiar and has been drawing visiting botanists for two centuries.

The mechanism is the water itself. A very deep body of water warms and cools slowly, so it acts as a thermal buffer on the strip immediately around it, holding the shoreline a degree or two above the ground behind and, more importantly, damping the extremes. That band is narrow. Climb two hundred metres above the lake and you are in a different climate with a different flora and, in a hard winter, snow on the ground while the shoreline below is merely wet.

Which is why the gardens run along the water rather than up the hill, and why every serious historic garden here has a limonaia, a long, tall, south-facing glasshouse where the lemons in their pots spent the winter. The microclimate is real, but it is not tropical, and the entire apparatus of the Lake Como garden is designed around getting tender things through four cold months within sight of glaciers.

There is a specific phenomenon in the rooms of a lakeside villa that visitors notice and cannot name. On a bright morning with a little movement on the water, the surface reflects light upwards through the tall windows and onto the ceiling, where it moves: a slow net of ripples travelling across plaster three metres above your head. It is the reason the ceilings in these houses are painted the way they are, and the reason the rooms feel lit from below rather than from above.

Almost every design decision in a historic room here follows from that. Windows are tall and reach nearly to the floor because the light source is horizontal, coming off the water rather than down from the sky. Walls are pale and burnished in marmorino, polished lime, because a slightly reflective surface bounces that low light back into the depth of a room that may be seven metres from window to rear wall. Floors are dark. Ceilings are the brightest surface in the room. Once you have seen it you cannot look at one of these interiors as decoration again.

The shutters are the control system and they are used quite differently here from the way visitors use them. Locals close them in the morning on the sunny side, before the room warms, and open them again in the evening, the point being to keep heat out of the masonry rather than to keep light out of the room. A house whose shutters are flung open all day in August is a house with foreigners in it, and it will be four degrees warmer at midnight.

In winter the same rooms invert. The water goes flat and pewter, the reflected light disappears, and a room that was luminous in July becomes a cave with a grey rectangle at one end. This is the honest reason so many of these houses were built as summer houses, and the reason that making one comfortable through a whole year is a lighting problem as much as a heating one.

The day has a shape here and it is worth knowing because most of the good things are at the ends of it. Before eight the water is flat, the light comes down the length of the lake from the north, the mountains on both sides are still in shadow, and there is almost nobody about. This is when the lake looks like the paintings of it, and it is available every single morning of the year at no cost, which is a fact remarkably few visitors act on.

Between about eleven and four in summer, the light is high, flat and unkind, the southerly is up, the water has texture on it, and the whole thing is at its least photogenic. This is the correct time to be in the shade, or in the water, or eating, or asleep. Nobody who lives here does anything strenuous outdoors in the middle of an August afternoon, and the visitors climbing to a belvedere at two o'clock are, gently, doing it wrong.

Then the last two hours before sunset, which on a summer evening here is a long, slow business. The sun goes behind the western ridge well before it actually sets, so there is an extended period when the western shore is in cool shadow and the eastern shore opposite is still fully lit and going gold. From the water in the middle of the basin you can see both conditions at once. It is the single most beautiful thing on this lake and it lasts about forty minutes.

And afterwards, the part almost nobody stays out for. The mountains kill the residual glow quickly, so dusk here is short and the dark is properly dark, with the villages showing as strings of lights along two shores and the water black and absolutely still. In the shoulder months, in October, with the day-visitors gone and the air cold enough to see your breath, standing at the end of a jetty at seven in the evening is the argument for the whole place.

Reduce it to three questions and you will make a better decision than most buyers do. Which way does the terrace face? What is directly behind the house, and how high? And which weeks does the sun leave this exact spot?

The first determines your day. East-facing gives you the morning and takes the evening; west-facing gives you the evening and a slow, cool start. Households with children and swimmers usually find they want the morning; households who entertain in the evening want the other. It is worth being honest about which one you actually are rather than which one sounds better.

The second determines your winter and a good deal of your maintenance. A house with a steep slope rising immediately behind it will be in shadow earlier every day of the year and will be damper on its rear elevation. That is not a reason not to buy it, since many of the finest houses on this lake are exactly like that, but it is a reason to look hard at the drainage above the property, at what the retaining walls are doing, and at how the north-facing rooms have been treated.

The third you can only get from people. Sun path software will tell you the geometry and it will not tell you about the notch in the ridge that lets an extra hour through in January, or the fact that the belt of trees on the neighbouring property is twelve metres taller than it was when the last owner bought. Ask the gardener. He has been standing on that terrace at four in the afternoon in November for twenty years, and he will tell you exactly.