Neither the Shelley party nor Byron felt happy at the Hôtel d'Angleterre. Apart from being full of inquisitive compatriots, it was also expensive (especially for someone with Byron's entourage). They had all begun house-hunting immediately after Byron's arrival and it can hardly have been an accident that they soon found places to live only a few hundred yards from each other. The focus for them both was on Cologny, which during the late eighteenth century had been the semi-permanent home of at least three rich English families. They lived there, according to one observer, ‘in the greatest cordiality with the citizens of Geneva, and one another’, and they made ‘the hill of Cologny the most delightful place perhaps at this moment in the world’. Without expecting quite this degree of felicity, Byron had been attracted in Cologny by a particularly handsome house known as the villa Diodati, but there were complications over the lease and it seemed too dear. It may well have been thanks to his influential banker Charles Hentsch that he was able to negotiate a satisfactory deal. He signed an agreement to rent the property on 6 June and moved in there four days later.

Ten days before his move the Shelley party had, with the help of Polidori, found a house almost directly down the hillside from Diodati and much nearer the lake. It stood in the area called Montalègre and was known as the Maison Chapuis, presumably from the name of its owner. Mary describes it in a letter as a cottage, but it was in fact a quite substantial, square, two-storey building and only cottage-like in comparison with Byron's residence.