The People You Need When You Own a House Here

Every one of these roles can be filled within a week. There are people on this lake who do all of it, some of them very good, and an owner who asks around will have three names for each job by the end of a fortnight. That is the easy half, and it is the half most owners believe is the whole thing.

The hard half is that you will not be there. For eight or ten months the house is occupied by nobody and visited by people you have hired, and every decision they make is made without you in the room: whether the render failing at the bottom of the north wall is worth mentioning now or leaving until it is obvious, whether the cheap valve will do, whether a job that took four hours is billed as six because nobody could tell. None of these is dramatic. All of them compound.

So what an owner is procuring is not hours of work. It is the standard somebody holds themselves to when there is no possibility of being caught, and there is no certificate for that. It is why the same house can be maintained excellently and expensively by one team and badly and expensively by another.

This is the appointment that matters and it should be made first, because in practice the manager will choose or approve most of the others. They hold the keys, they are on site when the plumber is on site, they know where the stopcock and the consumer unit are, and they are answerable when something has gone wrong in a house nobody has entered for three weeks. An owner who appoints a manager and then separately appoints a builder, a gardener and a pool company, all reporting to himself by email from another country, has built a structure with nobody in the middle of it, and will spend his holidays being the middle of it.

The work is mostly off-season, which is the part owners underestimate. Background heat and air movement through the winter. Gutters and hillside drainage cleared before the autumn rain rather than after it. The jetty and mooring lines looked at while the water is low. A walk of the grounds after every serious storm. In the season the same firm opens the house properly and deals with what fails while the family is in it.

What separates a good one is administrative rather than heroic: a written schedule of what is done and when, so the question of whether the boiler was serviced has an answer; photographs after a visit; third-party invoices passed through with the original attached and any margin stated openly rather than folded into a round number; one named person who answers the telephone; and an agreed figure above which they must reach you before committing to a repair, with a standing instruction below it so a burst pipe at midnight is dealt with rather than debated.

The failure mode is quiet and takes about two years. Reporting thins, invoices arrive as lump sums, the photographs stop, the house looks perfectly well in July, and one day nobody can say when anything was last done. Almost nothing was stolen and a great deal was lost.

The gardener is the most misunderstood appointment on the list, because a garden here is civil engineering before it is a planting scheme. The terraces are dry-stone retaining walls holding a wooded hillside above a house, and keeping them standing matters more than anything growing on them. A good gardener is also the person who knows the property best: which wall moved last winter, where the water goes in a storm. Almost nobody thinks to ask him.

For works, the architect comes before the builder and both come before anybody has an opinion about kitchens. Nearly the whole shoreline sits under landscape protection and anything of age is additionally subject to the state heritage authority, so a practice that works here spends more of the job on consent than on drawing. The builder is then judged first on access: most houses stand above or below a narrow road, reached by steps, a hillside monorack or the water, with nowhere to stand a lorry or a skip. Firms that work the lake price the handling as a line of its own; firms that do not price the job and meet the access afterwards, at which point the variation arrives.

The pool is a small trade with a short diary. Building one is a retaining-structure problem before it is a swimming problem, and on a protected setting it may not be consented at all. Across all of these the scheduling fact is the same: the trades that cannot work in an occupied house compress themselves into the winter. Work asked for in September gets done. Work asked for in May gets done next winter, or gets done badly, at speed, around your holiday.

Most well-run houses here are built around one or two year-round people, very often a couple, with seasonal help brought in for the weeks the family is actually here. That shape exists because the house needs very little for most of the year and a full team for a short burst. A housekeeper who has been in the same house for fifteen years is worth more than any two replacements, and not for sentimental reasons: she knows what the house looked like before it started going wrong.

A chef in the house is more ordinary here than visitors assume and is usually a practical decision. Supply is the difficulty: small village shops, a market that is a drive away on the right morning, numbers that change during the day, and a domestic kitchen never designed to send fourteen plates onto a terrace at once. The good ones are committed by spring and August is the hardest month to fill. Book late and you are choosing from whoever is left.

On employing any of them: domestic employment in Italy is governed by a national collective agreement and carries real obligations around contracts, hours, contributions and notice. It is payroll rather than a private arrangement, and it belongs with an accountant or a payroll professional from the first day rather than the first problem. That is deliberately the whole of what this piece will say about it.

A driver here is paid for knowing the roads rather than for time behind the wheel. The shore roads are narrow, walled and tunnelled, one coach holds everything up for half an hour, and there is frequently no alternative because the mountain is on one side and the water on the other. The good ones know when to leave, when to abandon the car and send the family by boat instead, and where a vehicle can stop outside a house on a blind bend without becoming the reason nothing moves.

The boat is the same job on water and the stakes are higher. The lake has a daily wind pattern, down from the north in the morning and up from the south through the afternoon, and the long northern reach can be genuinely rough while the middle stays flat. Chartering with a skipper is a licensed activity and the boat has to be certified for it, which is worth asking about plainly and early. The operator you want has said no to a crossing at least once, and looks after boats through the winter as well as driving them in summer, because the winter work is where the competence lives.

Three local conditions defeat studios who have not worked here: the damp of a house shut for months, the hard reflected light off the water, and an access route that will not take a finished sofa. The practices that work on this lake specify for all three, and have joinery made on site because it cannot be carried up the steps in one piece.

The obvious failure is a beautiful scheme that arrives at the bottom of the garden and stops. The expensive one is a designer engaged after consent is granted and the walls are up, by which point every service run, opening and floor level has been fixed by somebody who was not thinking about the room. On a project of any scale the designer belongs alongside the architect, not after.

These three are listed last and engaged first. The lawyer is the only professional in an Italian purchase acting for the buyer alone. The notary is a public officer acting for the transaction, and the agent acts for the sale. That is why foreign buyers appoint a lawyer before the preliminary contract rather than after it. Here the work concentrates on what makes shoreline title complicated: rights of way over a hillside, jetty and foreshore concessions, who owns which terrace, and a building's planning history. The notary then verifies title, draws and reads the deed, and registers the transfer.

The accountant is the one who never goes away, and this article is not the place to get advice from any of them. The point that belongs here is structural: these are the only people on the list whose failures are invisible in the house. A bad gardener shows up in the terraces within two years. A bad accountant shows up in a letter, much later, about something that could have been arranged differently at the start.

Start with the quote, because it is where owners make the first and most expensive mistake. The cheapest tender on a lakeside villa is usually the most expensive outcome, and not because anybody is dishonest. The cheap number is generally the number that has not priced the hard parts: getting material up a stepped lane, the scaffolding puzzle on a house with no flat ground, the fact that the wall behind the render is not what the drawing says. That work does not disappear when it is left out of a quote. It arrives later, as a variation, at a moment when you have no leverage and no alternative contractor free.

Then continuity, which matters more than credentials and is easier to check. Ask how long the people in front of you have worked together and how long they have held their existing houses. A firm that has looked after the same six properties for a decade is telling you something no qualification can: six owners who could have left did not. A firm that keeps losing houses is losing them for a reason the village already knows.

Then the most reliable signal, and the one owners misread as obstruction: the person who says no. A builder who tells you the thing you have asked for will not be consented. A manager who declines a house because he cannot reach it in time. A gardener who refuses to plant what you want because it will not survive the first winter above the shore. These are the people to appoint. Somebody who agrees to everything at the first meeting has either not understood the job or has decided to discover the problems later, on your money, when saying no would be awkward.

And watch the small things. Whether the plant room is labelled. Whether they photograph the work without being asked. Whether the invoice is itemised when nobody would have queried a round number. Whether they tell you what went wrong before you find it. Each is a proxy for the same quality: what a person does when it does not matter.

There is one method and it is unglamorous. Give the person a small job that does not matter, well before you need them for one that does, and watch the whole of it: whether they came when they said, whether they told you what they found rather than only what they did, whether the price at the end was the price at the beginning, and whether the site was left clean when nobody was coming to look. A gate motor, a length of guttering, a fortnight of holding the keys. It is worth more than any reference, because references come from people who were satisfied and what you need to know is what happens when nobody is watching. Do it in winter if you can. That is the condition you are hiring for.

We make introductions privately, one at a time, to people we know, for a particular house and a particular problem. There is no list to be sent. If you are assembling this team, or you have one and are quietly unsure about it, that is the conversation worth having first.