Living With a North Facing Room
A friend came over on a Saturday in June, stood in the doorway of the front room at two in the afternoon, and asked if I wanted the light on. It was the brightest fortnight of the year. Every window was uncovered. And her instinct, walking in, was to reach for the switch.
That was the moment I stopped pretending. The front room faces north. It has two decent sized windows and it has never had a patch of direct sun on the floorboards, not in June, not at seven in the morning, not ever. Whatever I did to it, it was going to be a room the sun passes by.
Three years of trying to make it something else
I did all the things. I painted a rented wall an off-white that the internet promised would lift a cool room, and got permission to do it, and it looked exactly as it had before except newer. I hung a mirror opposite a window. I took down a heavy curtain and replaced it with nothing at all, which I will come back to.
I bought pale cushions. I moved a dark bookcase out and put a lighter one in. Each of these things did something in the region of two percent, and two percent of not very much is not very much.
What none of it addressed is the actual situation, which is that a north window sees sky and never sun. The light coming in is even and cool and there is a fixed amount of it, and no arrangement of pale objects inside the room is going to increase the amount.
The one thing that did work: nothing on the sill
The exception was clearing the windowsills. I had plants on both, and a stack of books on one, and a jug. Between them they were taking up the lower third of the glass on the side of the room I sit in.
Taking them off felt like giving something up, because a sill with a plant on it looks like a home and a bare sill looks like a flat you are about to move out of. But the room genuinely changed, more than the paint did. If you are only going to do one thing in a dim room, look at what is standing in the glass. It is the only part of the window that you control completely.
The plants moved to a shelf on the side wall, where they are, honestly, less happy. That is a trade I made deliberately and I still feel slightly guilty about it.
Accepting daytime lamps
For a long time I had a rule in my head that turning a lamp on before dark meant something had gone wrong. I do not know where I got it. Some idea that a properly run house should not need electric light at eleven in the morning.
I have dropped it. There is a lamp on the low table by the sofa that goes on at about ten most days and stays on. On overcast days it goes on when I get up. The room is far better with it than without it, and the only thing standing between me and that for three years was a rule I made up.
What I did change is which lamps. The ceiling light in that room is unkind and I use it about four times a year, mostly when I have lost something. Two low lamps at roughly sitting height do more for the room than the one bright thing overhead, because they put light where I actually am rather than on the ceiling.
What north light is actually good for
Here is the part that took me longest to get to. A north room has one real advantage, which is that its light barely changes. There is no hard shadow moving across the floor, no hour where the sun is in your eyes, no fading of anything on the shelf by the window. It is the same at ten as it is at three.
Painters have known this forever, which is why north facing studios are a cliche. I am not a painter. But I do fold laundry in that room, and read in it, and it is the only place in the flat where I can look at two fabrics next to each other and be confident about what colour they are. Nothing in there is ever squinting-bright. Nobody has ever had to move seats.
The room is also cool in August, which in a top floor flat is not a small thing. The kitchen at the front is unusable at four in the afternoon in a heatwave. The north room is where I go.
What I would tell someone viewing a north facing flat
I would not tell them to walk away. I would tell them to be honest about which activities they want to do in that room, because a north room is a bad place to eat breakfast and a good place to work, and if you get those the wrong way round you will spend years faintly disappointed.
I would also tell them to look at what is outside the window rather than which way it points. My north windows look at sky, and that is why the room is merely dim rather than dark. A north window facing a wall two metres away is a different proposition entirely and no amount of white paint will help it.
Where I have landed
The front room is not bright and it is not going to be. It is even, it is quiet, it is cool, and it has two lamps that go on in the middle of the morning without anyone treating that as a failure. The sills are bare. The plants are somewhere less ideal. I stopped comparing it to the back bedroom, which gets the whole of the late afternoon and is a completely different sort of room to be in.
Most of the improvement in that room over three years was not something I added. It was me revising what I expected of it.
