Grand Hotel Tremezzo

The lake road through Tremezzina passes Villa Carlotta and its botanical garden, and then, a few hundred metres on, an ochre and terracotta facade stacked up behind a long terrace. Grand Hotel Tremezzo looks across the water to Bellagio, the point where the two southern arms of Lake Como meet, and the view has not changed since the hotel opened.

History

Enea Gandola and his wife Maria Orsolini built the hotel and opened it on 10 July 1910, at the height of the Belle Époque enthusiasm for the Italian lakes. The guests were northern Europeans who came down through the Alps for the climate. Edmund Goulding's film Grand Hotel, released in 1932, gave the house its best-known line: Greta Garbo's dancer says she wants to go to Tremezzo, where the sun and the water are.

The hotel passed through the century intact and has been owned by the De Santis family since 1975. Paolo De Santis ran it for decades, and his daughter Valentina De Santis leads it now. The family has rebuilt the property piece by piece since the 2000s, adding the lake pool, the spa and the Villa Sola Cabiati, without touching the outline of the original building.

Architecture and design

The building is pure Liberty, the Italian name for Art Nouveau, with five storeys of balconies, a square tower at the corner and a park climbing the hillside behind it. Inside, the public rooms keep their period plasterwork, parquet and chandeliers, and the colours are deliberate: reds, golds and the hotel's own shade of green on the terrace furniture. The park holds olive trees, cypresses, a lawn for events and a tennis court cut into the slope.

Rooms and suites

There are 90 rooms and suites, almost all with a view of the lake, and most with a balcony. The suites on the top floor and the rooftop suites added in recent years come with private terraces and, in some cases, their own outdoor hot tubs looking towards Bellagio. Furniture mixes original pieces with reproductions in the Liberty style, and the bathrooms are in marble.

Dining

La Terrazza carries the name of Gualtiero Marchesi, the chef who founded modern Italian cuisine, and his recipes remain on the menu. It occupies the glazed terrace on the first floor. L'Escale is the informal trattoria and fondue restaurant, T Beach serves lunch on the lakeside deck, and T Bar handles cocktails in the evening. The hotel also runs a small bar in the park.

Wellness

The T Spa sits in the park with an indoor infinity pool and treatment rooms overlooking the water. The hotel has three pools: the indoor one at the spa, a garden pool among the trees, and the Water on the Water pool, a floating structure moored in the lake itself beside the private beach. Boats can be arranged from the hotel's own jetty.

Weddings and events

The hotel hosts weddings and corporate meetings, with the park lawn and the terraces used for ceremonies and dinners. The Villa Sola Cabiati, an 18th-century villa a short distance along the shore that the hotel restored and opened in 2016, is let as a whole for private events and houses six suites. The hotel is closed from November to March, so the event season runs from spring to late autumn.

Location

The address is Via Statale 5401, Tremezzina, on the western shore of Lake Como between Lenno and Cadenabbia. The ferry pier at Cadenabbia connects to Bellagio and Varenna in minutes. Milan Malpensa is about 90 minutes by road, Milan Linate a little more, and the nearest railway station is Como San Giovanni, around 35 minutes away. Among the luxury hotels on Lake Como, this is the one next to Villa Carlotta, and the walk between the two takes a couple of minutes along the lake road.