Sunset Facing Homes in Phuket

Part 8 of 10

Phuket’s west coast faces the Andaman, which means the sun sets over open water from Mai Khao in the north to Nai Harn in the south. It is the single most requested outlook on the island, and the one buyers most often get slightly wrong — because facing west is not the same as having a sunset.

The sun moves through the year

It does not set in the same place in December as it does in June. Over the year the sunset point swings roughly forty degrees along the horizon, so a terrace framed by a headland on one side may have an uninterrupted show in one season and a rock in the way in another. If the view matters to you, ask which months are best from that specific terrace — a good agent will know, and the answer tells you a lot about how well the house was sited.

Elevation beats proximity

A hillside property two kilometres inland often has a better sunset than a beachfront one, because height clears the treeline, the rooflines and the headlands. It is also usually cheaper per square metre. The trade-off is the access road and the walk to the sand, which is the same bargain every hillside buyer on this island makes.

West-facing has a cost

The afternoon sun that gives you the view also heats the house. Look at what the design does about it: deep overhangs, solar glazing, external shading, and where the main bedrooms sit. A west wall of untreated glass looks spectacular at six in the evening and runs the air conditioning hard from two until dusk. It is a solvable problem, but it should be solved before you buy, not after.

Low season is the best season for this

Counter-intuitively, the most dramatic skies come during the monsoon months, when there is cloud structure for the light to work on. Clear-season sunsets are reliable but plainer. Buyers who view only in January sometimes never see the property at its best.