Il Sereno Lago di Como

Villa Pliniana has stood on the shore at Torno since the sixteenth century, long enough to have had Byron and Shelley to stay, and its owners have since built it a neighbour. Il Sereno opened in 2016, by one count the first new building on Lake Como's shore in seventy years, and Patricia Urquiola made no attempt to pass it off as a villa. Pale slab floors are stacked over a base of stone arches at the water's edge and screened with vertical timber slats, and all 40 suites look west across the lake through floor-to-ceiling glass. Inside she kept to wood and stone: speckled stone behind the beds and slatted timber overhead. The staircase is heavy wooden treads that seem to float in a thicket of copper-coloured rods, and Patrick Blanc has grown vertical gardens on the walls. A 60-foot infinity pool hangs over the lake at 27°C.

Recommended for anyone who would rather see Lake Como from the water than from a terrace, and for families, who have two suite categories of their own. The Riva family has built boats by hand at Laglio since 1771, and Il Sereno commissioned its fleet from them: self-drive Jetto boats for up to four, and the Vaporina, a water limousine fitted out by Urquiola. Take a Jetto out past the villas with a picnic packed by Raffaele Lenzi's kitchen, walk the ten minutes into Torno, and come back for dinner at Il Sereno Al Lago, where he holds a Michelin star at tables reaching out over the lake. The slowest way out is the Inglesina, a rowing boat of the kind the family first built on the lake in the 1930s, for English tourists, and the one boat in the fleet that goes exactly as fast as whoever is rowing.