Builders

On a flat site the getting of materials is an afterthought. Here it is half the job. A house on the water at Laglio or Torno may have no vehicle access at all, so cement, stone, scaffold and the skips going the other way all move by barge, timed around the weather and the water level. A house above the road is reached by a flight of steps or a small rack railway laid up the terraces, which means every bag is handled individually by somebody carrying it. Scaffolding on a lake-facing faade often has to be founded on a pontoon or hung from above. None of this is exotic to a firm that has done it for thirty years, and all of it is invisible in a quotation from a firm that has not. The single most reliable way to tell the two apart is to ask, before any price is discussed, how they intend to get a skip off the site.

The second constraint is the calendar, and it is tighter than owners expect. Nobody wants scaffold on the house in July, so the season for disruptive work runs roughly from the end of one summer to the beginning of the next, and inside that window the wet autumn takes weeks out of any external programme. Work on the water is narrower still, since jetties, slipways and boathouse floors are approached when the lake is low and the weather is settled. Lose the autumn to rain on a faade job and the honest answer is not a delay of a month but a slip to the following year. Good firms say this at the outset; the ones to avoid promise a summer completion in March and start apologising in June.

Then there is the fabric itself. Old houses here are rubble stone bedded in lime, rendered and limewashed, with heavy stone-slab or tile roofs and terracing built dry, without mortar, so that the hillside can drain through it. The classic damage of the last fifty years is cement: cement render trapping moisture in a wall that was designed to breathe, cement pointing in a dry-stone terrace that then blows out in the first hard winter. A general contractor who is competent at new work will happily do all of this to you. What we look for is a firm that keeps its own masons and plasterers, works in lime because it understands why, and can rebuild a dry-stone wall to the same line it had before, rather than subcontracting the one part of the job that actually needed a craftsman.