Security

Consider what a closed villa looks like from the water in January. The shutters have not moved since October, the garden lights are on a timer that everybody in the village can predict, the jetty is empty, and there is a wooded approach with no overlooking neighbours between the road and the front door. The risk that follows is opportunistic and seasonal rather than dramatic: this is a low-crime part of Italy, and what happens to second homes here is burglary in the quiet months, occasionally by people who arrive and leave by boat. The physical constraints are the same ones that govern every trade on this page. You cannot floodlight a hillside that is protected landscape, and on a listed building you cannot bolt a camera or a cable wherever the installer would like to put it, so the design has to work with the fabric rather than over it.

The failure that matters, though, is not detection. It is response. A great many houses on this lake have an alarm that reports to a monitoring centre in another province, which telephones a number that rings in London, which reaches a voicemail. Nothing about that arrangement causes anybody to walk into the garden. The question worth asking any firm is a simple one: when this activates at two in the morning in February, who physically attends, where do they set out from, how long does the shore road take them at that hour, and who holds a key. The second question is about the system itself. Power cuts, a broken line and a router that never came back after a storm are the ordinary causes of a system that has silently been offline since March, which is why monitoring only means something when somebody is checking that the monitoring is alive. That is usually a job shared with whoever manages the house.

Proportion is the last thing, and the hardest to sell. What most houses here need is a well-designed system, a real keyholder, and somebody who walks the grounds and looks at the building through the winter, not a presence at the gate. In a village where the families have known each other for generations, men in dark suits at the entrance to a house achieve precisely the opposite of privacy: they announce who is staying, they are discussed in the bar within the hour, and they make the house more interesting rather than less. Where close protection is genuinely required, and occasionally it is, the right version of it here is small, local, unbadged, and arranged so that nobody in the village has anything to talk about.