Mandarin Oriental — Blevio, Lake Como
Set within the historic Villa Roccabruna on the tranquil eastern shores of Lake Como, Mandarin Oriental offers a refined interpretation of Italian elegance, where timeless architecture, exceptional service and the beauty of the lake exist in perfect harmony.
An Introduction
Villa Roccabruna was built in the early nineteenth century by a family who wanted a house facing west, and everything about it follows from that single decision. The rooms are placed where the light will reach them in the afternoon. The terraces step down towards the water rather than away from it. The gardens were planted so that the cedars would eventually be taller than the roof, which they now are. It is a house designed around a view, by people who intended to sit and look at it for a very long time.
Blevio is on the eastern shore, a few minutes north of Como and a world away from the part of the lake that photographs itself. Stendhal came here. So did the sopranos of La Scala, who took houses along this stretch because it was quiet enough to sleep and close enough to sing. Artists and writers have been arriving on this water since the road was a mule track, for the same reason people still do: the mountains hold the weather, the surface goes flat at dawn, and time behaves differently.
What Mandarin Oriental added to that was not a style but a temperament. Service that anticipates without hovering, an instinct for silence, and enough confidence to leave the villa's character intact. The result is a luxury hotel on Lake Como that feels less like an arrival than a return. You come down for breakfast on the first morning and something in your shoulders has already changed.
Architecture & Design
The restoration was an exercise in listening. Marble floors were lifted, cleaned and put back with their wear intact. Stucco was repaired where it had failed and left alone where it had not. Where a nineteenth-century room wanted height and air, it was given both, and nothing was added to fill the space that height creates.
Into that came Italian craftsmanship of the present: soft oak, natural stone from the valleys behind the lake, handmade fabrics in the colours of unbleached linen and pale ash. Furniture chosen because it holds its shape without raising its voice. Nothing shines. Nothing competes with the window.
Outside, the terraced gardens keep their old geometry — gravel, box, stone urns, camellias, the cedars — and then simply stop at the balustrade and hand the view over to the water. That handover is the finest piece of design on the property, and it was finished long before anyone here thought to call it design.
Rooms & Suites
There is no category worth reciting. What matters is which way the terrace faces, and how long it takes you to stop looking at the water.
No. 01
You wake because of the light rather than the hour, and the first thing you do is push the doors onto the terrace and stand there in whatever you slept in. The lake is grey-silver and entirely still. A boat somewhere, not close. Behind you the room is linen, waxed oak, a floor that has been walked on for two centuries, and it asks nothing of you at all. Coffee arrives quietly and you drink it outside, and by the time it is finished the mountains have come back.
No. 02
These are rooms furnished the way a family furnishes a house it intends to keep: a chair where the light lands, ceramics from a workshop down the shore, a desk broad enough for letters no one is expecting. The bathrooms are marble, cool underfoot in August, quiet as a chapel. In the late afternoon the sun comes off the water and moves slowly up the plaster, and the correct response is to stop what you are doing and let it.
Dining
Breakfast is taken outside, close enough to the water to hear it. Bread, apricot jam, a peach, and the mist going off the surface in slow sheets while the first ferry crosses. It takes an hour if you let it, and you should.
L’ARIA cooks with what Lombardy sends down: lake fish caught that morning, butter from the valleys, missoltini in autumn, tomatoes in August that need nothing but oil and salt. The menus follow the season rather than the calendar, the pasta is made in the house, and the wine list argues gently for Italy — Lombardy, Alto Adige, a few Piedmontese bottles worth the drive they came from.
In the evening the terrace faces the last of the light. Dinner beside the water begins in bronze and ends in blue, and nobody is in a hurry to clear the table. Here, dining is not a separate event from the landscape. It is the landscape, arriving at the table a few hours later.
Wellness
The wellness gardens sit above the water on their own terrace, and they smell of what is growing in them — cedar, box, warm stone, a trace of rain from the mountains. Treatments are unhurried and largely wordless: hands, warmth, oil, and a long silence afterwards that nobody rushes you out of.
There is hydrotherapy, and there is the floating pool, which sits on the surface of the lake so that swimming in one becomes indistinguishable from swimming in the other. Early, before anyone else, it is the coldest and best hour of the day. The air off the mountains is thin and clean and does half the work.
None of it feels sealed away. You walk back to your room with wet hair, past the camellias, with the afternoon entirely unaccounted for. That, rather than any treatment, is what people mean here when they say they feel restored.
Signature Experiences
Most of them belong to the lake rather than the hotel, which is the point. One a day is plenty; none at all is also an answer.
No. 01
Mahogany, chrome, the smell of varnish warming in the sun. The boat leaves the pier before the ferries start and the lake belongs to almost no one. You pass shuttered villas, a chapel built into the rock, a swimmer. Nobody talks much. The engine drops to nothing in the middle of the water and you sit there, drifting, for as long as you like.
No. 02
Half past six, gravel underfoot, dew on the box hedge, camellias holding water in their petals. The cedars are older than the villa's second owner and they make the only sound there is. Walk to the far wall, turn around, and look back at the house from the angle its architect intended.
No. 03
Some of the great houses on this shore are still private, and occasionally a door is unlocked for someone who asked properly. Frescoed rooms with the shutters half closed, a library nobody has rearranged in ninety years, a garden running down to its own water gate. An hour, and no photographs.
No. 04
The helicopter lifts off the shore and the whole geometry becomes obvious at once — the Y of the water, the villages sewn along the edge, the Alps standing behind everything with snow still on them in May. Fifteen minutes. Enough to understand the place, not enough to spoil it.
No. 05
Behind the shore the hills rise fast and the vines are worked by hand because nothing else fits. You will be poured wine in a cellar that smells of stone and diesel and old oak, by someone who apologises for the glasses and is entirely right about the vintage.
No. 06
Flour on a marble counter, a chef who does not measure, lake fish that arrived at seven. You learn one thing properly instead of six things badly, and then eat it outside with the doors open and a bottle already half gone.
No. 07
The lake turns bronze around eight, then blue, and the lights come on across the water one terrace at a time. A glass, olives, no conversation required. This is the part of the day people remember, and it costs nothing but the willingness to sit still for it.
Maison Voyage Loves
Who This House Is For
It suits people who care about buildings and gardens, who would rather spend a morning in one villa than an afternoon in four, and who order the second bottle because the conversation is going well. Couples will find one of the most romantic luxury hotels in Italy here, without any of the theatre that phrase usually implies. Design travellers, cooks, wine drinkers and anyone whose idea of wellness begins with a cold swim before breakfast will be entirely at home.
It works beautifully for a celebration — an anniversary, a birthday, the long lunch that becomes the story of the year — and for slow travellers, who need no persuading at all. Come for a week if you can. The lake improves on repetition.
It will not suit everyone. There is no nightlife on this shore, no shopping street, and the villages close early by design. In high summer the lake is busy and the roads along it are narrow and slow. If you want something to happen every evening, Blevio specialises in nothing happening at all — beautifully, and for days at a time.
Nearby Discoveries
Lake Como rewards early risers and slow afternoons. None of this is a checklist; most of it is better reached by boat.
No. 01
Come by boat, not by road, and come late in the afternoon when the day-trippers have gone back down the lake. The stepped lanes are cool and empty then, the ironmonger is still open, and a table on the waterfront is a matter of asking rather than booking.
No. 02
Ochre walls, green shutters, geraniums, the lake appearing at the end of every alley. Walk the passerella along the water before the first ferry, drink a coffee standing at the bar with the men delivering bread, and leave before ten. A different town entirely by noon.
No. 03
Balbianello is a loggia on a promontory with water on three sides and the best terrace in Italy; go on the first boat. Carlotta is the opposite — botanical, generous, azaleas in May that stop conversation. Two gardens, two days. Trying them in one is a mistake people only make once.
No. 04
The cathedral, a silk workshop where someone still prints by hand, an old bar with a marble counter. Then the funicular to Brunate, which takes seven minutes and delivers the entire lake laid out below, best at dusk, with a plate of something simple at the top.
No. 05
Away from the shore the roads climb into chestnut woods and terraced vines. The wineries worth your afternoon have no signs, take no cards, and will keep you an hour longer than planned. Ask; someone will make the call. Buy two bottles and drink one that evening on the terrace.
No. 06
Every village on the eastern shore has one — a strip of shade, a wall against the water, an espresso and a glass of something cold. No view is more famous than the ones you find this way, sitting where the people who live here sit, doing nothing at all until the light changes.
Gallery
A Note from the Editor
Take a room facing west. Be awake at six on the first morning, even if you resent it, and watch the mist leave the water from the terrace. Keep one afternoon entirely unplanned. That afternoon is the one you will describe to people afterwards, and you will struggle to explain why.
Ben Trousil, Founding Editor
From the Journal
Hotels — August 2026
Ten houses between Como and Bellagio, chosen for how they hold the morning rather than how loudly they announce themselves.
Travel Guides — July 2026
Two days, one boat, and a rule against planning more than two things a day. Written for travellers who would rather see less, properly.
Slow Travel — June 2026
Why Villa Roccabruna captures Italian elegance — and what the eastern shore still knows about doing very little, very well.
A Personal Enquiry
If the lake has begun to sound like your next journey, we would be glad to arrange it personally — Villa Roccabruna itself, and everything around it.
A private Riva across the water, a villa opened for an afternoon, a table worth the boat ride, a cellar in the hills behind, and a few nights elsewhere in Northern Italy chosen to fit the way you actually travel.
Why book through Maison Voyage?
An Invitation
One letter each month: a place worth the detour, an object worth keeping, a page worth reading slowly. Nothing more.