Location: Blevio, Como, Italy

Design Team: Herzog & de Meuron

General Planning: Lombardini22

Gross Floor Area: 730 m²

Site Area: 5800 m²

Completion: 2026

Category: Restaurant, Hospitality Interior and Renovation

Lighting Consultant: Light.iQ

Furniture Collaboration: UniFor, RODA for You, Bonacina 1889

Photography: Robert Rieger

Design Features: L’ARIA sits in the gardens of Mandarin Oriental, Lago di Como in Blevio, facing the historic Villa Roccabruna across the grounds. The existing restaurant included a greenhouse, yet enclosed, dim interiors left it detached from the lakeside setting. Herzog & de Meuron retained the structure and extended it five metres into the garden with a covered veranda, recasting the relationship between dining room, greenhouse, terrace and Lake Como rather than starting again.

The veranda works as an all-season dining room and a climatic threshold. Folding glass doors allow it to open completely or close against changing weather, shifting breakfast, lunch and dinner between spaces over the course of the year. Leaf motifs move from muted rose Rubelli fabrics inside to sgraffito frescoes on the veranda walls; continuous flooring crosses the threshold, while an ivory-white coffered ceiling gives the former in-between zone the presence of a room.

Within the restaurant, dark walnut, Calacatta Oro marble and warm upholstery create an intimate register. The most distinctive surface is overhead: cast-glass tiles backed with brass catch light in fragments that change with movement, bringing something of the lake’s shimmer indoors. Furniture designed with UniFor develops the proportions of chairs and tables already used in the Villa Roccabruna bistro, establishing continuity across the hotel without repeating a fixed interior formula.

The existing greenhouse is retained and shaded by lattice panels derived from botanical trellises. Their checkerboard shadows move across Verde Alpi and Botticino marble, while green and mirrored furnishings are punctuated by red chairs. Nature is not a decorative backdrop here. Moving sun, growing foliage and the brightness of the lake continually alter the room, making the greenhouse the clearest register of seasonal change.

Below ground, a functional connection becomes a second spatial narrative. The passage from Villa Roccabruna ends in a timber wine cellar where walk-in refrigerators and velvet-lined niches turn storage into a collection room, before a stair rises to the restaurant. Across its 730 m², the project is light, open and reflective toward the garden, yet dense, timber-lined and subdued underground; the contrast completes the journey from hotel to table.

Design Team: Herzog & de Meuron was founded in Basel in 1978 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who both studied architecture at ETH Zurich and jointly received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2001. The studio has since become an international practice owned by its active partners, with teams drawn from around 50 countries and work spanning culture, housing, commerce, hospitality, infrastructure and urban research.

The practice is not defined by a single formal language. Each project develops from its site, existing fabric, material production and public life. Its organisation reinforces this approach: a Partner in Charge leads the work while other partners remain involved as critical sounding boards. Material tests, collaborations with artists and full-scale mock-ups are therefore not final embellishments but instruments through which the architecture is formed.

At L’ARIA, this method is evident in the retention of the greenhouse, the measured five-metre extension and the close coordination of glass, brass, walnut, two marbles, textiles and sgraffito. Herzog & de Meuron served as design consultant, Lombardini22 provided general planning, Light.iQ advised on lighting, and furniture was developed with Italian manufacturers including UniFor. The aim is not a detached hotel icon, but a once-enclosed restaurant remade as an instrument for sensing garden, lake light and season.