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Chasing the last of the good light

Where the sun lands in your home in August, and how to use it before it moves.

Free · an evening · 3 min read

A table set outside at dusk under warm garden lights

The sun drops roughly a degree of altitude every few days from here. The patch of floor that's warm at seven tonight will be gone by the last week of September.

It's worth two minutes of noticing, because the cheapest change you can make to a room is putting the thing you love in the light.

Find it first

Spend one evening watching where the light actually lands between six and eight — most people are wrong about their own house. It's usually a wall, not a window.

That wall is where a mirror earns its keep, and it is very often where the reading chair should have been all along.

Three moves

  • Chair into the last warm patch. Even for a fortnight, it changes which room you sit in.
  • Trailing plant onto the sill that gets evening rather than midday sun — it stops the leaf scorch that happens every August.
  • Eat outside on a weeknight, not just a Saturday. Late-summer weeknight suppers are the ones people remember.

Coming into season

When the good light goes indoors in late September, the answer is lamps rather than the big light. That's the next thing worth reading.

My SZN editorial inspiration — our own seasonal idea, not a listing for a verified external event.

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