Why we still photograph in October light

There is a particular hour, somewhere between four and five o’clock in the third week of October, when the light in London does something it does not do at any other time of year. It comes in low and long, the colour of weak tea, and it finds the back of a room the way nothing else will.

We have a rule at Maison, unwritten until now, that no west-facing reception room is photographed before that week if we can possibly wait for it. A buyer does not remember the floor plan. A buyer remembers the afternoon they stood in a room and felt, against all their own better judgement, that they could be happy there.

The argument against haste

The temptation, always, is to list quickly. A house photographed on a flat grey Tuesday in February will still sell. But it will sell for a little less, and to someone a little less certain, and the difference is almost always the light.

A room photographed in the wrong season is a true photograph of a thing that does not quite exist.

We would rather wait three weeks and tell the seller why. Most of them, once they have stood in the room at five o’clock themselves, stop asking.

What the camera cannot do

No amount of post-production replaces it. You can warm a photograph; you cannot give it the specific, slightly melancholy generosity of real October light falling on real oak. The buyers can tell. They cannot say how, but they can tell.

So we wait. The list stays small. The rooms, when they finally appear, look like the best version of themselves — which is, after all, the only honest thing to sell.