Location

The house is situated in Cuvio, 12 kilometres from Varese, 11 kilometres from Laveno Mombello on Lake Maggiore and 80 kilometres from central Milan.

Cuvio sits in the valley of Valcuvia, one of Italy’s greenest zones, earning it the name of the Campo dei Fiori, literally the “Field of Flowers”. Here walkers, paragliders and nature lovers gather in the spring, roast local chestnuts in summer and gather wild mushrooms through October. Wild boar and deer roam in the forests.

Further away, Lago Maggiore - one of the area’s seven lakes, its islands boasting tropical botanic gardens and stately homes - is 15 minutes’ drive away, as are the lakeside beaches of Ispra and Cerro. 50 minutes north is the wine-growing area of Ticino in Switzerland, while Milan is easily reachable in an hour by car or 70 minutes by train.

Description

The house was built in 1900 in the classic venetian style as Cuvio’s new Town Hall, opposite the Palazzo Litta, once the nobles’ resting place. Some municipal features are still there, like the traditional painted wall frieze, the tall glass-fronted cherry-wood bookshelves and a wrought-iron bracket for the civic flag on the balcony. Some older Cuvio residents still remember marrying there, and the house appears in many paintings and sketches.

After the Second World War it became the town’s only bank, then finally restructured as a private house in the 1980’s.
The open, high-ceilinged civic spaces were left intact, as was the original 1900 stained-glass rear door. New bathrooms appeared in very distinctive, styles, one in gold and pink and the other in aquamarine mosaics complete with mirrored suns and crescent moons. A contemporary steel floor level was added to the rear of the first floor, creating a walk-in wardrobe and shelves for books and artefacts. They all created a building even more distinctive than it ever was: classically elegant outside, and creatively fascinating within.
At the same time, the whole house was re-plumbed, rewired, re-floored in new parquet, re-roofed and double-glazed.
Since then, little has changed other than repainting, re-gilding of the balcony doors in rich yellow gold leaf, contemporary stained glass windows, and lighting with insect and animal motifs by a local artist.

The centrepiece of the ground floor is the “Stufa in Maiolica”, an ornate Austrian-style wood-burning stove decorated with hand-painted ceramic tiles. It separates the marble-topped kitchen from an airy living and dining area which the stained-glass main door bathes in a kaleidoscope of multicoloured light every day in spring and summer. Up the original stone and wrought-iron stairwell, the timber-roofed 80-metre-square first floor is the main bedroom, bathroom, sitting/music area and study, with library shelves for about 1000 books. With an ornamental stone fireplace, it’s lit by the high venetian windows, which in open out onto the balcony and historic Cuvio’s narrow, ochre streets. The bedrooms on the upper floor and the ground floor both have their own bathrooms. There’s also a third WC on the main stairwell. The brick-vaulted cellar, created in the days when lavish civic receptions were in vogue, runs almost the entire length of the house. It includes a new bar in local stone and a shelved wine-storage area. A separate laundry and boiler-room sits at the rear.

The house has a garden complete with fig trees, climbing roses of all colours and more stained glass, with space to entertain, chill and chat in the summer sun.