Waterfront or View? The Lake Como Decision Nobody Argues About Properly

This is the difference, and almost nobody says it out loud. From a terrace at the water's edge you are looking at the shore opposite: a mile of water and then a wall of mountain filling the frame, with a village on it you come to know house by house. A magnificent view, and a fixed one. The light on it changes, and the weather and the season behind it. That is why people fall in love from a waterfront terrace in June. But the composition never moves.

Now go up. Sixty or eighty metres above the same shore and the view stops being a wall and becomes a shape. The water has length to it, running away north and south, bending round headlands, with the promontory and the far branch stacking up in planes behind each other. You see the whole system rather than one face of it.

The two views also age differently. The waterfront view is a picture, and the better photograph, which is why the market prices it as it does. The high view is a machine, and you watch it work: the wind arriving as a dark line of texture moving up the lake, the ferry leaving the far jetty so you know how long you have, rain coming down the northern branch twenty minutes before it reaches you. People stop noticing a picture. They do not stop noticing weather.

Steps into the lake. That is the whole of it and it should not be underrated. Swimming from your own shore before eight, when the water is flat and there is nobody on it, is one of the irreplaceable things this lake offers, and no view compensates for having to get into a car to do it. A pool is not the same and everybody who has both knows it.

Then the mooring, which is the real asset and is constantly confused with the view. Frontage with a documented right to keep a boat in front of the house is the scarcest thing on this shore, because the shoreline is finite, largely built out and regulated. A house with a papered mooring and a house with a stretch of shore where a mooring might one day be created are entirely different purchases, and only one of them should be paid for. Treat a promised jetty as worth nothing until somebody who is not selling you the house has confirmed in writing what may be built there.

And the sound, which people buy without knowing they are buying it: water against stone all night, at a volume that shifts with the wind. It is the most persuasive feature of a waterfront house at two in the morning, and there is no substitute higher up, where the lake is a smell and a coolness rather than a noise.

A waterfront terrace is the most overlooked private space on Lake Como. The visiting economy of this lake consists of people on boats looking at the shore, and your house is the shore. Public boats pass with a top deck at roughly first-floor height and a hundred people on it facing your way; hire boats come in close, because close is where the photograph is. In season this is continuous, at eye level, and planting does not fix it, because anything tall enough to screen a terrace from the water is tall enough to take the view you paid for.

The good waterfront houses solve it architecturally: a garden that steps up from the quay so the terrace the family uses sits back and above the wall, a boathouse or a run of arcading closing the lowest level, cypress on the flanks rather than the front. Where it has not been solved it usually cannot be. Look at where a household would sit in August, not at where the photographs were taken.

The house above has the opposite problem and it is milder. It is overlooked from behind, from the lane, the terraces, the windows further up the hill. But that exposure is one-sided and fixed, you can see exactly who holds the sight line, and it is solved with a wall, a hedge or three trees, none of which costs you anything, because your view goes out over the front and down.

The counter-intuitive fact about sound here is that it rises. On a still evening a house well above the shore hears the village below with startling clarity: a car door, a conversation on a jetty, a party on a boat two hundred metres out. Buyers assume height means silence. What it means is that you hear everything at low volume instead of one thing at full volume.

At the water you hear specifics. Public boats going astern at the landing stage, a heavy low noise on a timetable. Hire boats, which have no timetable and are loudest at the hour you would like to eat outside. Motorbikes on the shore road on a fine Sunday, a well-known feature of the western shore and worse than any single boat. And where the road runs behind or above a waterfront house, the traffic is not beside you but over your head, with a retaining wall to reflect it back down.

Then the bells, which are not a joke and are the thing overseas buyers most reliably fail to check. Campanili here ring the hours, in many villages through the night, and in some the quarters as well. Whether that is charming or ruinous depends on how far the tower is and which way the bedroom faces. Go and stand where the bedroom will be, at eleven at night, and wait.

The right question is not whether a house has parking. It is how many metres and how many steps lie between where the car stops and where the shopping is put down, and whether that route is covered. On this shore the answer is frequently forty steps, uncovered.

Waterfront houses are worse on this than buyers expect, because on the western shore a great many sit below the road and are entered from the top. You arrive at roof level and descend, which is delightful on the first visit and is a service lift you will eventually pay for. Everything goes down and comes back up: the luggage, the bags from the market, the dog, and in due course the person who has had a knee replaced. Houses above the road have the same problem in reverse, though they far more often have room for two cars and somewhere to turn round.

Which is the moment to think about the house in twenty years rather than five. A stepped property is bought by people in their fifties and lived in by the same people in their seventies. Some adapt well. A small inclined lift on a rail is a common enough fixture here, though it is a machine that needs servicing. Some cannot be adapted at all, because the route is a public stepped lane and not yours to alter. Establish which you have before you fall for the terrace.

At the water you garden in a strip. The flat ground on a lakeside plot is narrow, the soil is often made ground behind a lake wall, the water table is high, and what thrives there is the tender shore planting the lake's thermal mass makes possible, a mechanism set out in our piece on the light on the western shore. Above, you garden on steps, and the plants are the easy part: the real asset is several hundred metres of century-old dry-stone retaining wall, and when one bellies out after a wet winter the wall is the symptom and the drainage is the cause. Budget for masonry, not for planting.

You also get frost. The band immediately around the water is materially milder than the ground behind it, so a house up the hill has earlier frosts, occasional lying snow and a planting palette closer to ordinary northern Italy than to the camellia-and-citrus version of this lake. One compensation surprises people: on the western shore the afternoon shadow comes down the hillside from above, so a house set well up the slope holds direct sun considerably later than the shoreline below it. It is the only respect in which the high house gets more of the lake's best asset than the waterfront one does.

A lake wall is a structure standing permanently in water and it is failing slowly whether or not anyone is watching. Mortar in the wetted courses is being leached out. The band at the waterline wets and dries continuously and freezes occasionally, which is the most destructive cycle available to masonry. Every boat that passes sends its wash into the same course of stone, and the public boats do it all day, all season, from the same direction. Iron near the water corrodes and, expanding, splits whatever it is set into. Above the waterline the lowest floor stays cool and humid all year, which is why boathouses, cellars and plant rooms are the rooms that cost money.

None of this is a reason not to buy on the water. It is a reason to buy the quay wall as carefully as the house, and to accept it as a permanent line in the running of the property rather than a repair. Inspect it at the winter low, when the base of the wall, the underside of the landing stage and the foot of the boathouse are visible. A high house has retaining walls instead, and they fail more slowly and more cheaply.

The other shoreline fact is high water. The lake is regulated and it still rises, chiefly in autumn and late spring, and the lowest band of the shore goes under with some regularity; the lakefront of the city of Como is the well-known example and not the only one. So the question on a waterfront property is what sits at that level: the boathouse, the plant room, the electrical intake, the cellar, the wine, the lift pit. Houses that have been in one family a long time are usually arranged sensibly about this. Recently converted ones sometimes are not.

A waterfront property has a side that cannot be closed. You can gate a drive, wall a boundary and put a camera on a lane, and you still have a garden anybody can step into from a boat at three in the morning without passing anything at all. The house up the hill has one approach, which is the whole of the argument in its favour, and one liability, which is that an isolated house at the end of a track in the closed season suits somebody with time. Height is not protection. Occupancy is, and what actually decides this is not where the house sits but whether anybody is in it or near it.

For most buyers who will use the house properly, more than three weeks a year, in more than one season, with a family, a car and eventually a bad knee, buy the house above the water. Not reluctantly, and not as the affordable version of the real thing. It is the better house. The reasoning is that the waterfront's advantages are concentrated into the eight weeks when the lake is busiest, and its disadvantages are spread across the whole year. You buy it for swimming off the steps in August, which is glorious, and then live with passing decks at eye level, a road behind your head, a lake wall that eats money, a lowest floor you cannot fully trust in November, and nowhere sensible to leave two cars. The house eighty metres up gives you the view that stays interesting after five years, more afternoon sun, somewhere to park, privacy you can arrange rather than negotiate, a drier building, and a garden with proper ground under it.

There is one clean exception and it is not a small one. If the water is the actual reason for the purchase, if you swim every day you are here, if you own a boat you will use four days a week, if you have children who will spend the whole summer in the lake, buy the waterfront and accept the rest. Twenty vertical metres between a household and the water is the difference between going down to it without thinking and going down to it as an outing. Households who will use the water daily should be on it. Households who tell themselves they will, and who at home own a pool they swim in twice a year, should not pay for the belief.

And one arrangement is better than either, as the older families here worked out long ago: the house up the hill with a separate parcel on the shore. A garden, a quay and a boathouse below, held as a distinct title; the house above, out of the wash and the noise and the sight lines. You get the view along the lake, the parking, the privacy and the dry building, and you still walk down to your own water. These exist on both shores and are almost never advertised as what they are, because the shorefront parcel does not photograph as a house. That is the thing to look for, and it is worth waiting a year to find.