Lake Como is one of those places where the landscape itself sets the design brief. The water, the mountains, the old stone villas - everything already speaks a language of calm, beauty and history. Whatever you add has to join that conversation rather than start a new one.
What the house already had
Our client's villa dated from the 1920s. The bones were exceptional: original terracotta floors, vaulted ceilings, arched windows that framed the lake like paintings. Our job was not to redesign - it was to complement.
That sounds modest and it is actually the harder brief. A shell gives you freedom; a house like this gives you constraints you did not choose, and every one of them has to be answered rather than removed. The floors are not level, because floors of that age never are. The walls are not straight. The window openings are beautiful and they are where they are.
Complementing means leaving things alone
The first decisions in a project like this are about what not to touch. We kept the terracotta, with its unevenness and its colour variation, and we did not grind it flat or seal it to a shine - both of which would have made a hundred-year-old floor look like a new copy of itself. We kept the vaults unpainted in flat modern white and used a warm lime finish instead, so the curve still reads as mass rather than as plasterboard.
The practical consequence is that the furniture has to absorb the irregularity. A long sideboard against a wavy wall needs either a scribed back or a deliberate gap; a dining table on an uneven floor needs adjustable feet, and somebody has to be there to level it on delivery day. In a new apartment these are details. In a 1920s villa they are the project.
Materials that echo the landscape
We chose materials that answer the lake rather than compete with it: linen fabrics in natural undyed tones, hand-plastered walls in a warm lime finish, local stone for the bathroom surfaces.
Undyed linen is the quiet hero of a house like this. It moves, it creases, it changes with the light through the day, and it ages into something better rather than something worn. Lime plaster does the same on a wall: applied by hand, it holds a faint variation that reads as depth, and it lets an old wall breathe instead of trapping moisture behind a modern paint film. Local stone in the bathrooms keeps the house in its own geology, which matters more than it sounds - imported marble in a lakeside villa always looks like it arrived by lorry.
Mixing vintage pieces with new Italian furniture
The furniture is a careful mix of vintage pieces sourced locally and new Italian pieces by Meridiani and Flexform, and it sits as though it has always been there.
Mixing periods is easy to get wrong. Three rules kept it honest. First, match the weight, not the style: a vintage walnut cabinet and a modern sofa belong in the same room if both feel substantial. Second, let the old pieces be the characters and the new pieces be the comfort - nobody wants to sit on a hundred-year-old seat every evening, and nobody wants a room with no history in it. Third, keep the palette narrow across both. When the materials agree, a fifty-year gap in the dates stops being visible.
Living in an old house, not photographing one
A lakeside villa is a humid building, and that changes the specification. Solid timber moves more here than in a dry city apartment, so veneer over a stable core is the safer choice for large doors and panels. Natural fabrics near a window facing the water will fade, which argues for undyed tones that have less to lose and for curtains that can be cleaned rather than replaced. Lime walls can be patched invisibly by someone who knows how, which is the advantage that pays for the extra care they need.
And an old house asks for its own maintenance calendar: terracotta wants its wax or oil renewed, lime wants nothing but a dry cloth, and upholstery near the water wants its covers off and cleaned at the end of a season. Factories that offer removable covers make that part trivial, which is reason enough to specify them in a house like this.
The result
The result is an interior that feels earned rather than designed. Guests walk in and feel the history of the place - not because we preserved it unchanged, but because every choice we made was in conversation with it.
If you have a period property and you want it furnished without being flattened, send us the plans and the photographs. We will tell you honestly which pieces from the factories we work with directly will sit comfortably in it, which finishes will survive the humidity and the light, and what the realistic production times are, with a price on request.
