LAKE HOUSE

A lovingly restored 18th-century villa and a glamorous shorefront resort at Lake Como are the stuff of dreams

- MICHAEL HARDEN

When you are after a literal example of “living the dream”, being handed a glass of perfectly chilled prosecco while on board a 1961 Riva timber speedboat that’s skimming across Lake Como on a cloudless day is hard to beat. So breathtaking is the combination of the boat’s streamlined retro beauty, the water’s otherworldly glimmering, the magnificent Swiss Alp backdrop and the passing parade of glorious villas and picturesque, hill-hugging towns that it’s hard not to believe you’ve fallen down some kind of Alice-like rabbit hole and landed in an actual dream.

Lake Como is one of those exceedingly rare places that not only lives up to its considerable hype but is also capable of surpassing it. The beautiful northern Italian lake has a long-time reputation as a playground for the glamorous, the artistic and the powerful – a rollcall of Italian aristocracy, Napoleon Bonaparte, the great opera composer Vincenzo Bellini and, in more recent developments, celebrities like international lawyer Amal Clooney and her movie star husband George. All that inherent hype may have you girding yourself for a bit of lily gilding and faded glory.

Instead, and particularly after last year’s opening of Lake Como’s newest hotel, Passalacqua, a lovingly, meticulously restored 18th-century villa sitting above seven acres of terraced gardens that run down towards the lake’s shore, you quickly understand the glory is anything but faded.

Bought and re-invented by the De Santis family, owners of Grand Hotel Tremezzo, the operatic shorefront resort hotel 20 minutes further north that’s an obvious design inspiration for film director Wes Anderson, Passalacqua is a hotel that succeeds so spectacularly by not feeling like a hotel at all.