Orientation Is the Only Specification You Cannot Renovate
Kitchens are replaceable. Bathrooms are replaceable. The direction a house faces is fixed for its entire life, and it is the specification buyers examine least.
Éloise Marchetti
Partner & Senior Market Advisory
Photography: Interior room in low afternoon light
A client once asked me to value two houses on the same Sardinian hillside, four hundred metres apart, built in the same decade to almost identical specification. One was worth roughly thirty per cent more than the other. The difference was thirty-one degrees of rotation.
The thing that cannot be changed
Almost everything in a house is a decision that can be revisited. Kitchens are replaced on a fifteen-year cycle. Bathrooms similarly. Roofs, services, glazing, insulation, layout, and in many jurisdictions the envelope itself — all of it can be altered by a sufficiently determined owner with sufficient capital.
Orientation cannot. A house that faces north-east at completion faces north-east when it is demolished. It is the one specification that is genuinely permanent, and in my experience it is the one buyers spend the least time on.
What it actually governs
Orientation determines when a room is usable. A west-facing terrace in the Mediterranean is unusable between one and four in the afternoon for five months of the year, and is the best room in the house for the two hours after that. An east-facing bedroom is awake at five in June whether its occupant is or not.
It also governs running cost. Thermal load on a south-west elevation in Andalusia is roughly double that of a north-east one, which translates directly into cooling plant, cooling cost, and the frequency with which that plant is replaced.
How we record it
We note the aspect of every principal room on our book, and for coastal and alpine properties we record the sun angle at the equinox and both solstices. Where the decision between two properties is close, we will ask a client to return at a different hour before they commit. Roughly one client in six changes their preference after doing so.
A short test
Stand in the room you would use most and ask what time it is. If the answer is the time you would actually be in it, the house is oriented for you. If the light is arriving three hours before or after you would want it, no renovation will fix that, and no photograph will have told you.
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