Editorial

The Como Private Desk

The desk is responsible for the reference material on this site: the village pages, the guides, and the standing answers to the questions we are asked most often.

Based in Lake Como and the United Kingdom

Its job is to be specific where the rest of the internet is vague about this lake: which shore holds the light, where you can actually tie up, what a village is like in February. It is also to say plainly when a figure has not been checked rather than publishing one that reads well.

Writes about

Lake Como
Editorial standards
Verification

Guides by this desk

The Complete Guide to Lake ComoThe shape of the lake, the light on each shore, what changes with the season, and which village answers which question.

Where to Buy on Lake ComoNot a ranking of villages, but the seven things that actually decide where on this lake you should be looking.

Where to Stay on Lake ComoPosition decides more about a stay here than the house does: which shore, which branch, how you arrive and what you will actually do with the day.

Where to Eat on Lake ComoEating well on this lake is less about knowing names than about knowing the pattern: how far from the ferry quay to walk, when the kitchens close, and what the lake itself actually produces.

Milan to Lake ComoThree airports, two useful railheads, one slow shore road and a last leg that is very often best done on the water.

Journal pieces

A House in FebruaryWhat actually happens to a stone house on this lake in the four months nobody photographs, and why the owners who come in the worst month make the soundest decisions in the spring.

Inside the World of Lake Como's Historic VillasTwo thousand years of building the same house in the same place, and why the plan of a villa here has barely changed since a Roman lawyer described his two of them in a letter.

The Quiet Side of BellagioThe most photographed village on Lake Como is also the one people most often see wrongly, because they arrive at two in the afternoon and leave at five.

The Long Lunch Still Matters HereThe length of lunch on this lake is not indulgence and it is not leisure. It is structure: the load-bearing part of the day, and where a surprising amount of family and business life is actually conducted.

The People You Need When You Own a House HereFinding somebody to work on a house on this lake is easy. Knowing which of them to trust with it while you are in another country for ten months of the year is the whole problem, and it is not solved by credentials.

Renovating a Lake Como Villa Without Ruining What Made You Buy ItAlmost nothing on this lake is ruined by bad taste. These houses are damaged by improvements that are individually reasonable, taken one at a time, by owners who love the building.

The Case for TremezzinaThe great gardens are on this shore because the lake goes wide here and the mountains stand back. That piece of geography is the entire argument for owning on it, and it is also the source of every objection to doing so.

Why Lake Como Villas Look the Way They DoA villa on this lake has two faces that barely acknowledge each other, and almost everything about the building is a consequence of which face it is on: the loggia, the raised floor, the shutters, the colour, the roof.

The People Who Keep the Lake WorkingBehind every villa on this shore is a small number of people whose working year runs in the opposite direction to everybody else's. There are fewer of them each decade.

The Light on the Western ShoreA lake that runs north to south has only two aspects, and they are not equal, which is why the villages opposite each other across a mile of water live entirely different days.

Bellagio or Varenna: Two Ways to Live on Lake ComoThey face each other across a mile of water and are compared endlessly by people spending an afternoon in one of them. For anyone staying months or buying a house, the differences that matter are almost none of the ones usually listed.

The Lake After Everyone LeavesThe season here does not taper off, it stops. What is left is a different landscape with different light, different weather and a fraction of the population, which most owners have never once seen.

After You've Done Lake ComoThere is a point at which a person stops visiting this lake and starts understanding it. Almost nothing about the change is informational. It is a change in what you do with a day.

The Lake at SevenThe lake keeps different hours from the people who come to look at it. Between six and nine it is a working place, and it is the part of the day the rest of the day covers up.

Why People Keep Coming BackThe hold this lake has on people is physical before it is anything else: deep water in a trench, an unusually coherent built shore, and a working city close enough that the place is lived in rather than performed.