The Villa Between Two Centuries

The villa had been dying for as long as Francesca could remember, though she would not have used that word. She would have said dormant, or perhaps waiting — the way Italians speak about old buildings, as though they are living things with moods and intentions of their own.

## The Inheritance

Francesca inherited the property on the western shore of Lake Como when her father died in the winter of 2019. The villa was two hundred years old, neoclassical in the Lombard tradition, with arched loggias that framed the lake like a sequence of paintings and a crenellated tower pavilion that some ancestor had added in the 1880s, possibly out of vanity, possibly out of genuine romantic feeling. The ochre-framed windows were protected under Vincolo Paesaggistico. The roof leaked. The heating system dated from 1974. The plumbing was a mystery that three successive plumbers had examined and declined to solve.

Francesca's plan was to convert the villa into a boutique hotel — eight suites, a restaurant, a small spa. The plan was sound. The problem was everything else.

## The Authorities

In Italy, a building protected under Vincolo Paesaggistico cannot be altered without the approval of the Soprintendenza — the heritage authority whose mandate is preservation and whose instinct, in Francesca's bitter experience, was refusal. Her first architect submitted drawings that proposed removing two interior walls to create a reception area. The Soprintendenza rejected them in four months. Her second architect submitted drawings that preserved every wall, every cornice, every cracked tile. The Soprintendenza approved them, but the resulting floor plan was so constricted that no hotel operator would sign a lease.

Francesca was running out of money. The villa was running out of time. The roof had begun to admit not just water but daylight, and the insurance company had written a letter that managed, in two paragraphs, to convey both sympathy and the withdrawal of coverage.

## The Third Approach

We proposed something that neither the first architect nor the second had considered: working with the Soprintendenza, not against them. We invited the heritage inspector to the villa. We walked every room together. We asked him not what could not be changed, but what he loved — what, in his professional judgment, was the soul of the building.

He pointed to the loggias. The arched windows. The proportions of the tower room. The terrazzo floors in the lower corridor. "These," he said, "are what make this building worth saving."

Everything else — the 1974 radiators, the asbestos ceiling tiles in the service wing, the plywood partitions added in the 1960s to subdivide the piano nobile into apartments — all of it could go. And with it went the constraint.

## The Hotel

We designed eight hundred square metres of interior within the existing shell. Como silk textiles in the salon. Dark Marquina marble on the master suite feature wall. Wrought iron balustrades restored, not replaced. Chestnut ceiling details cleaned and re-oiled by hand. A lake-source heat pump feeding hydronic underfloor heating beneath every stone and marble floor — invisible technology serving visible heritage.

The master suite became our measure of the entire project: a floor-level platform bed in black leather set against a full wall of dark veined marble, two spherical bronze sconces casting warm light across the stone veining, and a casement window opening to the lake. Nothing was added that the building did not ask for. Nothing was removed that the building still needed.

## What Francesca Discovered

The hotel opened in the spring of 2024. Full occupancy from May through October. The Soprintendenza inspector returned for the opening. He stood in the restored loggia and said, "This is what I hoped someone would do."

Francesca told me later, over a glass of Franciacorta on the terrace, that the most unexpected discovery was not the hotel's success. It was the building itself. "I inherited a problem," she said. "You gave me back a villa. I didn't know the difference until I saw it."

Heritage is not a constraint. It is a conversation with everyone who built before you, and the best projects are the ones that listen.