Project Overview
- Location
- Lake Como, Italy
- Year
- 2023
- Category
- Private Residence
- Size
- 620 m²
- Status
- Completed
About the project
A lakeside residence carved into the hillside, oriented to hold the changing light off the water through every room from dawn to dusk.
How This Project Came Together
01
The Brief
02
The Problem
03
The Approach
04
The Outcome
A retreat that doesn't compete with the lake.
The client, a family of four splitting their year between Milan and Como, asked for a house that would disappear into the hillside rather than announce itself to the water. No grand gesture — just rooms that hold the view without ever fully surrendering to it.
A steep, narrow site with no flat ground to build on.
The lot dropped twelve metres from road to shoreline across a 40° slope, with mature chestnut trees the client refused to remove. Conventional excavation would have meant clear-cutting the hillside and pouring a retaining wall the height of the house itself — the opposite of what a lake house should feel like.
Four stepped volumes, following the land instead of fighting it.
Rather than one large structure, we split the brief into four smaller volumes that step down the slope on independent foundations, connected by a covered external stair. Each volume rotates a few degrees to slip between the existing trees, so not a single mature chestnut was removed during construction.
A house you discover in sequence, not all at once.
Arriving from the road, you see only timber and stone — the lake reveals itself gradually, room by room, as you descend. The client now spends most weekends on the covered stair itself, which has quietly become the house's real living room.
In Detail
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