The People Who Keep the Lake Working

Ask a gardener on this lake what he does and he will answer with a calendar rather than a list. Late winter, while the house is empty: the olives are pruned, hard, before the sap moves, and the terrace walls get looked at and rebuilt in sections where the winter has pushed them. Early spring: the roses, the recommissioning of the irrigation, the pots replanted, the gravel raked back after four months of leaf and rain. April and May are the camellias and then the azaleas going over, and the wisteria, which is pruned twice a year by anybody who knows what they are doing and once a decade by everybody else, which is why so much of it has got into the eaves.

Then June arrives and the job changes character completely. Everything grows here at a rate that has to be seen: the lawn is cut twice a week, the hedges are done twice in the season, the irrigation runs at night, and the whole exercise becomes maintenance of a garden that is being looked at every day by a family who are in residence. Nothing structural can be done between June and September because there are people on the terrace.

Autumn is the leaves, and on a property under chestnut woods that is not a metaphor. It is weeks of work: the gutters, the drainage channels, the terraces, the paths, all of which have to be clear before the winter rain, because on a slope blocked drainage is how water gets into a building. Then the pots go into the limonaia, the tender things get wrapped, the irrigation is drained down, and the year starts again.

The reason to set it out at length is that the gardener is the person who knows a Lake Como property better than anybody, and almost nobody interviews him. He knows which wall moved last winter, which tree is a liability, where the water goes in a storm, what the previous owner stopped paying for and why. Before we let anybody buy a house here we try to get them half an hour with the man who cuts the garden, and it is consistently the most informative half hour of the whole process.

In the summer the boatman's day is early and repetitive. He is at the mooring before eight to take the dew off, because on a varnished deck overnight water marks if it is left to dry in the sun. He checks the cover, the lines, the fenders, the bilge. Then he does whatever the household requires, which is usually four short journeys and one long one, and a good deal of standing about in the middle of the day waiting for people who said one o'clock.

In October the whole thing inverts. The boats come out, and they are lifted, washed, dried and put on trestles under cover. The winter is the actual work: the finish, the engine, the metalwork, the upholstery away for cleaning, the electrics, everything that cannot be touched while the boat is in use. A yard on this lake is busier in January than in July, and the people who work in it spend the summer running errands and the winter doing their trade.

This upside-down calendar has a consequence owners run into every spring. A boat that has been booked in for winter work in October comes back ready for Easter. A boat whose owner rings in March joins a queue formed six months earlier, and the work either gets done badly at speed or does not get done that year. The same is true of moorings, covers, tenders and everything else: on this lake the season is bought in the autumn.

The people who do this work are not numerous and they are not, on the whole, replaceable. Finishing a wooden hull properly is a trade learned over years, and the number of workshops on this lake capable of doing it to the standard that a serious boat requires is small enough that everybody in the business knows all of them by name. It is a good example of the lake's general condition: a very high-value asset base resting on a very thin layer of specific skill.

Every well-run house here has somebody who holds the keys, and the job has a formality it does not have elsewhere. In the old arrangement it was a custode couple in the lodge, he doing the grounds and the fabric, she the house, and on the larger properties that arrangement still exists. In the modern version it is a property manager with a dozen houses, or a housekeeper who has looked after the same family for thirty years, or some combination.

What they actually do is less about service than about surveillance in the benign sense: being the person who notices. The stain on the ceiling of the top-floor bedroom that was not there in October. The gate motor that is straining. The neighbour's tree that has grown over the boundary. The letter from the comune sitting in the box. The smell in the cellar. None of these is an emergency on the day it appears and all of them are expensive a year later.

They also do the thing that makes the difference between a house that works and a house that is a source of low-grade stress from another country: they hold the relationships. They know which plumber will actually come on a Sunday in August, what the electrician is like, who to call about a wall, and, critically, they are known to those people, which on this lake determines whether the telephone gets answered. A foreign owner ringing a tradesman cold in high season is at the back of a queue. The same call from somebody the tradesman has worked with for fifteen years is a different call.

And they arrive first. Somebody opens a house before the family: shutters back, water and gas on, the boiler lit, the beds made, the fridge filled, the pool balanced, the boat run and warmed, the terrace furniture out and wiped. It takes two days properly and it is the reason arriving at a well-run villa feels effortless and arriving at a badly run one involves three hours on the telephone before anybody has had lunch.

The economy of a lake village does not support specialists in the way a city does, and the result is that almost everybody working here has more than one trade and more than one season. It is one of the genuinely charming things about the place and it is also the source of most scheduling frustration, because the man who is your electrician in February is skippering a boat in July and will not be answering the telephone.

The pattern is consistent enough to be predictable once you know it. Trades that cannot work while houses are occupied, such as building, decorating, joinery and garden structure, compress themselves into the winter and take summer work in hospitality or on the water. The trades that serve the season are flat out from May to September and available all winter: boats, drivers, cooks, housekeepers. The professions that work all year, the geometra and the architect, spend the summer preparing applications for work that cannot start until October.

The practical instruction that follows is about timing rather than money, and it is the single most useful thing a new owner can learn. Ask for building work in September, not in May. Book the boat's winter service before the boat comes out. Arrange the following summer's staff in the previous autumn. Anything you request in the week you need it will be either declined or done by somebody's cousin.

It also explains a social feature outsiders find odd, which is that the same face recurs. The man who took you across the lake is the brother of the woman who does the laundry, whose husband did your terrace wall. The lake is long but the villages are small, and the corollary is that your conduct as an owner circulates. Paying quickly and being reasonable about time is not merely decent; it is the most effective procurement strategy available here.

Nothing on this lake is where a lorry can reach it. That single fact shapes every trade here and it is the largest hidden variable in the cost of any work on a lakeside property, and the one that visiting contractors from Milan or from abroad reliably fail to price.

In the historic villages the buildings are on stepped lanes. Nothing wheeled goes up them. Material arrives at the bottom and is carried, or goes up on a small tracked barrow, or comes in from the water; scaffolding on a lane house is a puzzle before it is a cost. In the villages on the road, the road is single-track, walled on both sides, and has a bus on it every twenty minutes, so a delivery vehicle stops the entire shore while it unloads, which is why deliveries happen at seven in the morning.

Then there are the houses reached only from the water, of which there are more than people imagine, and where every bag of sand, every window, every kitchen and every tradesman arrives by boat. That work is done by a small number of people who own a barge and know how to work off one, it is weather-dependent, and it is slow. It is why a renovation on a boat-access property runs on a different timescale and a different budget from the identical building with a road to it.

And above the shore, the mule tracks. The terraces behind these villages were built and worked before anything had wheels, and they are maintained today by people who walk up them with tools on their backs. A gardener rebuilding a section of dry-stone wall two hundred metres above the road is carrying stone by hand, and that is not an inefficiency to be engineered away; it is simply what the job is.

The uncomfortable subject in all of this is age. A great many of the people who hold the specific skills this shore depends on are in the latter half of their careers, and the pipeline behind them is thin: the dry-stone wallers, the terrazzo layers, the plasterers who can work marmorino, the men who finish wooden hulls, the gardeners who understand a century-old planting scheme rather than merely cutting it.

The reasons are not mysterious. The work is hard, seasonal and physically demanding; the training is long and largely informal; and the children of the people doing it have watched their fathers carry stone up a hill in February and drawn the obvious conclusion. Meanwhile the value of the assets these skills maintain has gone up by an order of magnitude, which has not translated into the trades in the way an economist would predict, because a boom in villa prices does not automatically create apprentices.

What that means for an owner is practical and slightly urgent. The good people are booked a year ahead and they are choosing their clients. Being an owner they want to work for is a real advantage and it consists of nothing complicated: decide things, pay on time, do not haggle over the last five per cent, do not ask them to work around your holiday, and understand that a man who has rebuilt terrace walls on this shore for forty years is not a commodity to be tendered against two others.

It is also why we keep the list we keep, and why we do not publish it. The people on it are individuals, many of them working alone or with a son, and their capacity is finite in a way a firm's is not. The value of knowing who they are is entirely destroyed by everybody knowing. What we will say publicly is the structural part: on this lake the building is the easy bit to buy, and the person who can look after it is the scarce thing.