North Facing Garden – Yay or Nay?

We’re looking at placing an offer on a house which is west facing, but the main garden and all of the houses main windows are north facing onto the side garden. The house was a little gloomy when I viewed it, but is appallingly (darkly) decorated and has small windows. I assumed that by installing a few French doors, and redecorating it could be made to be quite light. Now I’m not so sure.

Experience/ opinions?

I wouldn’t personally, it will just be dark and gloomy, esp in Winter.

if you could install a large conservatory that may help as north facing works better with them. Otherwise, its not ideal!

Depends how big it is and surrounding houses / tree coverage. Our back garden faces NE and I thought it would be a problem but as its big it doesn’t matter.

In the winter the beds nearest the house / neighbours hedge don’t get a lot of sun but once spring comes its fine.

I had to make a similar consideration this time last year. we did buy the house and it has been great.

The only thing I did was upgrade the lighting. The north facing elevation has a patio door so this does help.

We have spent the winter in the house and I didn’t notice any real difference to our previous south facing house.

If you like everything else about the house I’d say go for it.

We are NW facing in a sheltered end of a valley. Massive windows and French doors really help. I’d rather be on the other side of the valley as I jealously see all their extra sun time. I think aspect would be pretty high on my list these days.

I live in a house with an East facing garden and it annoys me every evening as the patio disappears into the shadow and the car and driveway bask in sunlight.

I wouldn’t dream of it, orientation is the number one consideration for me in future.

It will really annoy you in summer when you want to have a BBQ in shade. Depends how much the rest of the house is what you want, how desperate are you etc. Replacing a few doors with ones with glass/windows in does help a lot to let in light for rooms that suffer from darkness, obv you can only do this downstairs.

I’m fairly certain that the garden will get sun (obviously not the north facing wall) through most of summer as it’s not obscured from either the east or west. My major concern is regarding what it’ll be like in winter…

This gives you a rough idea, I’m currently stressing about a SE facing garden.
Sun Calculator

We bought with a north facing garden, previously it was always a big no no for me but the house itself was just what/where we wanted so that was one of the few compromises. The house itself is very light as the lounge is at the front with a massive floor to ceiling window, we’ll be putting patio doors in the back to help brighten the kitchen/diner but it’s actually not been that bad through this last winter.

The garden itself still gets a surprising amount of direct sunlight as there is plenty of space between the neighbouring houses.

If everything else is OK then I wouldn’t worry.

Edit: That sun calculator thing is brilliant.

Suncalc is quite handy when looking at houses and where the sun will be throughout the year:
Suncalc

Dammit – beaten to it.

It is good enough to put twice!

Suncalc is indeed very useful, it certainty helped persuade me to buy my current house that has a WSW facing Garden, which is nice 🙂

My current house and a previous one I owned both have N facing rears and gardens. However both have patio doors and large windows so no problems with light. No problems either with the gardens. Current one has a large enough back garden that there is always some sun on it and by 14:00 in the summer you will find that there is sun everywhere right up to the rear of the house so no problems with barbeques- unless you like breakfast barbeques!

We have a north facing cottage with small windows. We love it it is very homely and we spend most nice weather outside. We painted most of the interior white which helps and we have four lamps spread around the open plan kitchen/sitting room.

If the garden is large then you get the sun all day anyway and we get the best of the evening sun and we are sheltered from prevailing winds.

This picture was taken in a late spring evening

We have an almost due north facing rear garden. In the house, large windows front and rear give plenty of light – no problems there.
Outside, generally the sun has moved round sufficiently by mid afternoon for the rear garden to be in direct sun most of the time we’re likely to be sat outside.
We need decent blinds on the front windows to keep overheating under control in the front facing rooms – this for us is a bigger issue.

Same as Pickers. The front of our house faces South and during the summer gets very hot. Meanwhile the back is quite cool. It can mean that the lights in the rooms at the back of the house need lights on during dark winter days. In addition to large windows, you also need to think about decoration. Lights walls, windows, ceiling can make a huge difference

Mines north facing. House is not gloomy at all and the patio is at the bottom of the garden. The house only casts a shadow about 6ft. The front rooms are unbearably hot in summer (when we’ve had one!) so the cooler rooms to the rear are nice.