Inside the World of Lake Como's Historic Villas

Pliny the Younger, who came from Como and wrote a great deal of correspondence about his own affairs, described two houses he owned on this lake. One stood high up with a long view; the other sat down at the water where he could fish from his bedroom window. He gave them nicknames, and the distinction he was drawing is precisely the distinction a buyer draws here today: the house for looking out from and the house for being in the water at.

That is not a charming coincidence. It is the origin of the type. The Roman idea of otium, of a country house whose entire purpose is the cultivated use of leisure, was practised on this shore before it was practised almost anywhere, and it never really stopped. What changed was who could afford it: the Renaissance and then the eighteenth century brought Milanese families out to build on the same slopes, the nineteenth century brought the rest of Europe, and each generation built a version of the same brief.

The brief is worth stating because it explains the buildings. You want a house that faces water. You want to arrive at it by boat, and to be seen arriving. You want a formal room on the first floor with the view in it. You want a garden that solves the fact that the ground behind the house goes almost vertically upwards. And you want somewhere to keep the boat. Almost every historic villa on this lake is an answer to those five requirements, and the differences between them are matters of taste and money rather than of type.

It also explains why the shore looks as it does from the water. This is not a coastline that was developed; it is a coastline that was landscaped, over four centuries, by people competing politely with their neighbours. Villa Carlotta, Villa Melzi, Villa del Balbianello, Villa Serbelloni, Villa Monastero, Villa Cipressi, Villa d'Este, Villa Erba, Villa Olmo, Villa Pliniana. The famous names are simply the ones that survived intact and are now open, and there are several hundred lesser versions of the same idea in between them.

Approach a historic Como villa from the water and you are reading a diagram. At the bottom, at the lake, there is a water gate or a landing stage, frequently with a boathouse, a darsena, cut into the substructure so a boat can be taken in under cover and out of the weather. Above that, a terrace or a low garden, then the principal faade, then the ground rising behind into terraces, then woodland.

The axis matters enormously and is often the first thing a bad renovation destroys. The house is organised on a line running from the water into the hill: you land, you come up steps, you pass through a portico or an atrium that goes straight through the building, and you emerge into the garden behind. Standing in the entrance hall of a properly preserved villa you can usually see the lake through one door and a fountain or a stair through the other. That line is the whole idea of the building, and blocking it, typically with a kitchen, is the single most common act of vandalism performed by well-meaning owners.

The formal rooms are on the first floor, the piano nobile, for the obvious reason that the view is better and the damp is worse below. That floor is usually a single enfilade of connected rooms across the lake front, with doors aligned so you can see from one end of the house to the other, and a central salone that is taller than the rooms flanking it. Ceilings are high, windows are tall, shutters are internal or external depending on the century, and the balcony over the water is structural rather than decorative.

Behind and above it all is the service world, which people forget to look at and which tells you most about how these houses actually ran: a back stair, a kitchen well away from the dining room, a laundry with a stone basin, a wine cellar dug into the hill, an ice house buried in the woods where snow was packed and kept into summer, and a lodge at the gate for the family who looked after it. On a large villa that infrastructure is a third of the built area, and what to do with it is the central question of every modern restoration here.

The surfaces in these houses are almost never what a visitor assumes. The walls that look like polished stone are usually lime, either marmorino, burnished with a trowel and soap until it takes a sheen, or scagliola, which is gypsum worked with pigment and polished to imitate marble so convincingly that people tap it. The columns are frequently plaster over brick. The marble that is marble tends to be local, from the quarries around the lake, and is used sparingly for thresholds, stairs and fire surrounds.

The ceilings divide into three. In the grandest rooms, painted decoration: mythological scenes, or the calmer neoclassical version with grisaille panels and painted architecture that fools the eye into thinking the room is taller. In the secondary rooms, coffering or beams, sometimes painted, sometimes simply chestnut. And in the service rooms, vaults: shallow brick vaults that are cheap, strong and everywhere, and which are the reason so many of these buildings have survived two centuries of neglect without falling down.

The floors are the giveaway on dating and quality. Terrazzo alla veneziana, which is lime and marble chips ground and polished in place, was laid across whole floors of these houses and is repairable rather than replaceable. A good terrazzista can cut out a section and reinstate it invisibly, which is a skill still practised on this lake and by very few people. Above that, wide chestnut or larch boards. And in the older parts, cotto: fired clay tiles, waxed, uneven, and the surface that most reliably tells you a room has not been interfered with.

Heating is the honest anachronism. These were not year-round houses, and they were warmed, if at all, by fireplaces and by tiled stoves fed from the corridor so a servant never entered the room. There is no historic solution to making a nineteenth-century villa comfortable in February, which is why every serious restoration here is, underneath the discussion of finishes, a very long argument about where you can put pipes.

On a slope this steep the garden is a work of engineering before it is a work of horticulture. Terraces are cut into the hill and held by dry-stone walls built without mortar, laid by hand, drained by the gaps between the stones. They are structures. When one fails it does not look untidy; a section of hillside moves, and on this lake it moves downwards towards a building.

Two traditions sit on top of that engineering and you can date a garden by which one won. The Italian manner is geometric and architectural: axes, steps, balustrades, clipped hedging, water made to run down the hill in a controlled line, statuary at the turning points. The English manner arrived in the nineteenth century with the tourists and did the opposite: lawn, serpentine paths, specimen trees planted for their form, and views composed as if by a landscape painter. A great many lake gardens are one laid over the other, with the formal bones of a seventeenth-century layout still visible under a Victorian planting scheme.

The planting itself is possible because of a genuine microclimate. The mass of the lake moderates the temperature, the mountains take the worst of the north wind off certain stretches of shore, and the result is a band along the water where camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons flourish, where citrus survives the winter under cover, and where things grow at a rate that alarms northern European owners. The limonaia, a long building with tall south-facing glazing where the lemon pots overwintered, is a standard component of a serious villa garden and one of the most useful buildings on any of these estates today.

The features people photograph are the follies at the ends of the axes: the nymphaeum, a grotto with water running through it, cool in August; the belvedere at the top of the climb; the little temple on the promontory. They look decorative and most of them are not. They are the destinations that make a vertical garden worth walking up, which is the entire problem a Lake Como garden exists to solve.

The great villas of this lake are in four kinds of hands. A small number belong to the state, to comuni, or to FAI, the Italian national trust, which holds Villa del Balbianello on its promontory and opens it. The arrangement by which a private family's house becomes a place anyone can visit is a very Italian solution to a very Italian problem. Some belong to foundations and universities. Some have been converted to hospitality or to congress use, which is what has saved several of them. And the rest are still private.

The economics behind those categories are brutal and worth stating. A villa of forty rooms with three hectares of terraced garden, a lake wall, a boathouse and a lodge is a building that consumes money continuously whether or not anybody is in it. Families that held such houses through the twentieth century did so with staff who lived on site and were paid very little, and that world has gone. The houses that survived intact did so because somebody found them a use, whether public, institutional or commercial, or because a private owner arrived with the means to treat the running cost as a subscription rather than an investment.

For a private buyer the practical consequence is that the interesting properties are rarely the famous ones. What comes to the market, quietly, is the second rank: the villas built by Milanese merchant families rather than by aristocrats, the twenty-room house with a good garden and a boathouse, the summer house of a nineteenth-century industrialist that has been in one family since. These are the buildings the whole of our property work is actually about, and there are far more of them than most buyers imagine.

The other consequence is that provenance is a real component of value here in a way it is not in most markets. A house with its original layout intact, its terrazzo unbroken, its ceilings unpainted-over and its garden bones still legible is a materially different asset from the same building after a 1980s conversion into flats, and the gap between them is not a decorating budget. Undoing that kind of work costs more than the original construction did and takes considerably longer to get permission for.

A building of recognised historic interest in Italy carries a vincolo, a formal constraint, and the body that administers it is the Soprintendenza, the heritage authority. Buyers hear this and imagine a planning department. It is not that. It is a professional conservation body with a statutory say over what happens to the fabric of a protected building, and its remit runs to things owners do not expect: the colour of the render, the section of a window frame, whether a floor can be lifted, whether a partition inserted in 1955 may be removed, and what happens in the garden.

There are two things to understand about working with it. The first is that it is not, in our experience, obstructive so much as slow and specific. It generally says yes to work that is reversible, well-documented and executed by people who know what they are doing, and it says no to work that removes original fabric or changes the reading of the building. The second is that it operates on its own timescale, and that timescale is not compatible with an owner who decided in April that the terrace should be different by July.

The practical discipline this imposes on a protected house is planning two seasons ahead as a matter of routine, and instructing an architect who has an actual working relationship with the office concerned. That relationship is not influence; it is fluency. Knowing how to present a proposal, what to document, what will be waved through and what will provoke a year of correspondence is a specialism, and the difference between an architect who has it and one who does not is measured in seasons.

There is a compensation, and owners of protected houses tend to come round to it. The constraint is also the reason the thing you bought still exists. Every villa on this lake that still has its ceilings, its floors, its enfilade and its garden bones has them because at some point somebody was prevented from improving them. If you are buying into that world, the correct posture is custodial rather than proprietorial, which sounds like a platitude until you have spent a winter arguing about a window, at which point it becomes the only sane way to think about it. What that argument costs and how long it takes is set out in our guide to renovating a historic villa.