Why Lake Como Villas Look the Way They Do

Look at an old villa here from a boat, then walk round to the road and look again, and it is briefly difficult to accept that it is the same building. The lake elevation is composed: symmetrical or very nearly so, a centre marked by a loggia or a taller bay, windows in an even rhythm, a string course, a cornice, a parapet, steps arriving at a landing stage. The other side is a wall with a door in it, two or three windows placed wherever the rooms needed them, a downpipe and a gate onto a lane.

That is not neglect but an accurate account of how the building was used. For most of the life of most of these houses arrival was by water. The boat was the carriage, the quay was the drive. The water side is therefore the front in the full architectural sense: a faade, meant to be read at a distance by somebody moving. Hence the coarse ornament. Close up, the modelling on many of these fronts is rough, which is correct workmanship rather than poor, and colour does the work that carving cannot.

The other face is engineering. It takes the hillside, the water coming off it, the deliveries, the staff and the stairs, and it is plain because plainness is what that job requires. Hold the two as separate problems with separate briefs, and the vocabulary of these houses stops reading as style and starts reading as consequence.

A loggia is a roofed room, open on at least one side, cut into the mass of the building rather than added to it, which distinguishes it from a portico, a columned porch at an entrance, and from a veranda, which is attached and usually later. That a family paid to remove floor area from the best storey of the best elevation tells you what they thought it was worth.

It does four things at once. It shades, because a deep recess keeps high summer sun off the glazing behind it while a low winter sun, arriving almost horizontally across the water, still reaches under the head. It is the outdoor room, and in practice the room the household lived in for four months of the year, which is why the formal salone in many of these houses feels underused. It is a transition between glare and a dim interior, so the eye adjusts in stages. And it is structure, which is why the centre of a lake faade is often visibly heavier than its ends.

It sets the module too: the rhythm of the arcade below usually governs the spacing of the windows above, so the elevation follows from a decision taken about an open room. And it is almost never on the back. A loggia facing the hill, in permanent shade, looking at a retaining wall, would be a room for nobody. That is the cleanest proof available that these houses were organised around one direction.

The lake rises and falls. Not dramatically in most years, but enough, and a room at quay level will at some point be wet: from the lake, from spray driven across the terrace by a hard southerly, and continuously from capillary rise through stone that stands in water. So the lowest storey is the sacrificial one: vaulted, floored in stone or cotto, thick-walled, given over to the boat, the cellar and the stores. It is built to get wet and to dry again, and left alone it does exactly that.

The principal floor sits on top of it, and the arrangement buys three things. Dryness. View, because from one storey up you look over the parapet, the quay wall and the plane trees rather than at them. And privacy, because a lake shore is a public thoroughfare, and a drawing room at eye level from a passing boat is a drawing room with the shutters half closed.

The change of material up the elevation follows the same logic. The base is stone, because that band takes wave, splash off the paving, ice, mooring lines and boat hooks, and lime render there fails within a few winters. Above the splash zone, render. The line where they meet is a record of where the weather reaches, and on a house rendered down to the water you can see the consequence without getting out of the boat. Higher still the windows shrink and the storey drops to the attic. The elevation is graded vertically by importance, and the grading is legible from the water in the size of the openings.

The windows on the lake face are tall and come close to the floor, because the light arriving at them is horizontal, reflected up off the water rather than falling out of the sky, and a tall opening admits far more of a low source than a wide one. Walk round to the back and the same house has short windows set high. There is no view to open there and no low light to catch, so the openings are as few as the rooms behind them will tolerate. The proportion of a window here reports which face it is on.

The shutters are the climate control, and there are two systems rather than two options; a good house has both. The persiana is the external louvred shutter and its job is thermal: it stops sun before it reaches the glass while still letting air through, which is why a room behind closed persiane on an August afternoon is dark, moving and cool rather than dark and stifling. The scuro is the solid internal panel folded back into the reveal, for darkness and a little insulation at night. Heat rejected outside the glass never enters the room; heat stopped inside it has already arrived. Every internal blind here is fighting a battle the persiana had already won.

The persiane also carry most of the colour on the building, usually the one saturated element on a rendered front, a green or a grey-green. Because they can be open, closed or set at an angle, the elevation has three readings depending on the hour and the season. A shore of shuttered houses in February is a different piece of architecture from the same shore in August.

The render is lime over rubble stone or brick, and it is not a finish in the modern sense. It is sacrificial and breathable: it takes the weather so the wall does not, and it lets moisture in the masonry move outwards and evaporate. It is meant to be renewed periodically, as a maintenance item, in the way a boat is painted.

The colours follow from the material. Pigment went into the render or into a limewash over it, and the pigments that survive in lime are earths: ochres, siennas, umbers, red earths, with white lime to lighten them. That is the whole reason this shore runs through cream, straw, ochre, a dusty terracotta rose and a pale warm grey, and why there is essentially no blue and no strong green on a wall. It also happens to be right: those colours sit against water that is green-grey to slate for most of the year and a hillside dark green for nine months of it, and an ochre wall holds low light after the sun has gone behind the ridge. Detail is often painted rather than built for the same reason: quoins and surrounds in trompe l'oeil read at three hundred metres as well as carved stone, at a fraction of the cost. That is not fakery but precision about the brief.

The roof is the render's umbrella. Shallow pitch, the curved clay tiles called coppi, and a wide overhang at the eaves that throws water clear of the wall below. Wherever a later alteration cut those eaves back or ran a gutter tight to the face, the render underneath is the render that is failing.

Behind almost every one of these buildings the ground rises, and on the steeper stretches the house is built against a cut in the hillside. Something has to hold that hillside up, and the first thing to establish about the back of a lake villa is whether the building itself is doing it. In the ones that have survived well, it is not. There is a drained void between the retaining structure and the rear wall, an intercapedine, sometimes a walkable gap, sometimes a sunken courtyard the length of the elevation. It lets the retaining wall be permanently wet, as retaining walls are, without the house being wet with it. Where it has been filled in, usually to gain floor area, the rooms behind it are the damp rooms in the house.

The rest of the hill face is organised around service. The gate and the courtyard are here, because a house with its front at the bottom is entered at the top and worked downwards. The back stair is on this wall, which is why its windows sit at half-landing heights and look scattered from outside. The roof valleys and the downpipes are here. And the first terrace of the garden is usually the roof of something, or the top of the retaining wall itself. That is worth establishing before anybody proposes a swimming pool up there.

None of this is a lesser architecture, only an unselfconscious one. The lake face was composed; this one was solved, repeatedly, by people adding what was needed where there was room, and that difference is what a later intervention either understands or does not.

The nineteenth century added enormously to these houses and mostly got away with it, because it was building in the same language on the same logic. The moves are still visible: the terrace pushed out over the water, a wing set back so it defers to the centre, a belvedere raised to take the view further. All of it respects the hierarchy: front is front, back is back, the middle is the middle.

The one move that reliably damages a front is glazing the loggia, and it has been done here in every decade since. It converts an open room into a usable one for a longer season and appears to gain something for nothing. What it costs is not floor area but depth: the loggia read as a dark void at the centre of the elevation, and that shadow gave the faade its modelling. Fill it with glass and the front goes flat.

The twentieth century arrived with the road, and the back became an entrance for the first time. Some of that is fine: a garage cut into the base storey is reasonable treatment of a floor that always had irregular openings. The damage of that century was material rather than compositional, and it is the same list building after building: cement render over lime, which stops the wall drying outwards and pushes a century of moisture inwards instead; the drainage gap at the back filled in; concrete balconies on the lake face; clipped eaves.

Which leaves the modern glazed intervention, and a rule more useful than any argument about old and new. The lake face is a composition with a grammar of rhythm, symmetry and solid dominant over void, and a large sheet of frameless glass breaks it in a way that cannot be argued back afterwards. The hill face has no such grammar. It is additive, irregular, functional, and has been altered continuously for as long as the house has stood. So the same architect, with the same detail and the same budget, produces a glazed link into the hillside that reads as one more honest layer, and on the front produces something that reads as an injury. The base storey is the exception, and where the best modern work here tends to be: its openings were always irregular, so a glazed room behind the quay sits where the same gesture a floor higher would not. The test was never old against new. It is whether the addition knows which face it is standing on.