Villa Bonomi wedding

The villa stands on the hillside above the western shore at Bignanico, eight minutes from the centre of Como and eight from Cernobbio, looking south down the first reach of the lake.

It was built for Anna Bonomi, the industrialist, and given to her by her father Carlo on her sixteenth birthday. The four hectares of garden around it were laid out by Pietro Porcinai, the most significant Italian landscape architect of the last century, and they are the reason to come here rather than the house.

It is run by Tree Collection and let whole, as a private villa, to one party at a time.

The garden is designed as a sequence of named spaces, and the brochure’s own masterplan reads like a running order.

A level green expanse below the house where the hills and the lake meet in the view. This is where the ceremony goes, and where a seated dinner goes with it.

Set in the trees, with statues and climbing plants, looking over the pool and the water. The aperitivo belongs here.

A smaller window on the lake, screened by the planting and quieter than the rest, for the toast or the photographs.

A long walk through the greenery to the edge of the property.

Cut into the lawn with a blue mosaic lining, chosen so the water does not throw light back at the house. There is a cement tennis court beside it.

A main room, two fireplace rooms, a dining room, a living room and the kitchen on the ground floor, which between them give the wet-weather alternative to all of the above.

A Villa Bonomi wedding starts from €250,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €400,000 all-in.

€20,000 plus 10% VAT a night, with a minimum stay of three nights. That is about €66,000 with VAT for the three, and it takes the house, the park, the pool and the tennis court with nobody else on the property.

A villa manager, a housekeeper and a gardener in residence, and all eleven suites. The panoramic pool, the tennis court, and four hectares of garden and Parterre.

Food and drink, which the brochure lists as a dedicated service arranged ad hoc rather than included. Private security, audio and lighting, and transfers.

A lifeguard with dedicated staff is also outside the rate, which on a property with a pool and a guest list is not a line to skip.

On the lower floor there is a professional kitchen, and it is hired rather than included: just under €2,000 a day once VAT is on it. It is restricted to caterers who can demonstrate the competence to use it, which narrows the field before anyone has quoted.

City tax is €3 per person per night. A damage deposit falls due ten days before arrival and is returned after departure.

Two numbers are missing from the file, and their absence is the most useful thing on this page.

There is no stated guest ceiling, and there is no stated music curfew.

That is not an oversight, it is what the document is: an accommodation proposal for a private villa, written for a family taking a house rather than for a couple holding a wedding. Nothing in it forbids a wedding and nothing in it sizes one either.

The practical consequence is that both numbers get agreed with the villa manager and written into the contract before a deposit moves. We would not plan a wedding here on an assumption about either, and we would be particularly careful about the hour, because this is a residential hillside above Como and the villa supplies no sound equipment of its own.

Eleven suites with double beds, sleeping 22.

Nine are in the main house. The master suite on the first floor is 55 square metres, with a wardrobe room and a balcony over the Parterre and the lake. Room 4 on the same floor looks at the water, Room 7 on the second floor has a terrace over it, and the rest face the park. Rooms 5 and 6, at 13 and 12 square metres, share a bathroom; every other room is en-suite.

Two more are in Casa di Anna, a cottage in the park. Room 9 on its ground floor looks over both the lake and the garden, and Room 10 above it at 34 square metres looks at the water.

For a wedding of eighty, 22 beds means the rest of the guest list stays in Como or Cernobbio, both eight minutes away, which between them hold more hotel rooms than anywhere else on the lake.

The villa is on the Via Bignanico above Como, on the western side at the southern end of the lake, a few minutes uphill from the Chilometro della Conoscenza.

Como is eight minutes away and Cernobbio eight.

Milan Malpensa is 55 minutes by road, Linate an hour and three and Bergamo an hour and 19. Lugano across the Swiss border is 35 minutes, which is the shortest run to any venue we hold on Lake Como.

Bellagio is 43 minutes and Varenna an hour and eleven, which matters only if somebody has booked a hotel up the lake.

Ask about the year before you ask about the price.

This villa is let to a small number of parties a season as a private house, and by the time most couples hear of it the dates they want are gone. Everywhere else on this lake we open with the budget. Here we always open with the diary, and we would rather put a couple into the summer two years out than into a compromise next year. It is the single piece of advice that changes the outcome.

The second thing is that the absence of a guest ceiling cuts both ways. There is no rate card telling you that 110 costs more than 109, which is freeing, and there is also nothing in writing protecting a plan for a hundred guests on the Parterre. We get the number and the finishing hour into the contract at deposit, and we have never regretted doing it in that order.

The third is the kitchen, which is the quiet constraint. Hiring it is cheap against everything else here, but it is open only to caterers who can show they can run it, and that shortlist is shorter than the open market on this lake. We would settle the caterer before the date rather than after.

Then there is Porcinai, which is worth understanding rather than just reading. A Porcinai garden is built as a sequence of outdoor rooms with sightlines between them, and this one gives a wedding a Parterre, a Loggia, a Terrazza and a Promenade that already know what they are for. The running order designs itself, which is not true of a lawn.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa Bonomi from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the dates asked for two years ahead, the guest number and the finishing hour written into the contract before deposit, the caterer chosen against what the kitchen will allow, the three nights priced as the weekend they are, the symbolic ceremony on the Parterre, and the rooms in Como and Cernobbio eight minutes down the hill.

We have worked the Italian lakes for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the three nights come to.