At the Mandarin Oriental Lago di Como‘s newest restaurant, the same marble-topped counter serves as a breakfast buffet of cornetti and pastries by morning and an aperitivo or omakase bar by night, its identity turning over completely with the light. The addition, called L’Aria, is the third intervention by Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron at the Blevio resort, following the studio’s earlier Floating Pool & Spa and the Nami Café. Extending an existing greenhouse pavilion rather than replacing it, the project asks how much a single room can hold across the course of a day.
The original structure, a small pavilion topped by a greenhouse, was, according to the studio, “neither highly functional nor aesthetically integrated into the overall ensemble.” By extending the building five meters toward the garden through a new covered veranda, the architects created a weather-protected space usable year-round for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, alongside a generous terrace facing the lake. As with the practice’s earlier work at the resort, “the intention was to work with what was already in place rather than pursuing a tabula rasa approach,” the studio said in a statement.
Inside, a large marble bar anchors the room, with consoles set into the surrounding niches doubling as a buffet in the manner of a traditional Italian bar, stocked with cornetti, biscotti, and breakfast pastries. Come evening, the same counter hosts aperitivo or, on selected nights, an omakase service, the atmosphere shifting under the golden light of cast-glass luminaires suspended overhead. The bar stools were designed to tuck fully beneath the counter, turning it into an unbroken sculptural volume whenever seating isn’t in use.
The Palladiana terrazzo floor, laid in Botticino and Bianco Perlino marble, references the traditional flooring found in villas along the lake. Rose-colored fabric wall panels, embroidered with leaf motifs and developed exclusively with Venice-based Rubelli, line the curved walls that wrap around the bar. The bar counter itself is carved from Calacatta Oro marble, set on a solid base upholstered in the same leather used for the chairs.
A cast-glass-tiled ceiling spans the entire room, allowing brass behind the glass to shimmer through at varying intensity. Its tones shift with the available light, moving between opaque gold and transparent, watery hues — an effect the studio compares directly to the lake itself outside. Below, dark walnut furniture, polished to a high gloss, forms a quiet material link to the historic Villa Roccabruna, whose own bistro furnishings share the same palette.
Furniture throughout L’Aria was designed specifically for the restaurant as a further development of the chairs and tables used in the villa’s bistro, carrying that language outdoors into weatherproof versions used on the terrace. The continuity extends to the veranda, where the interior’s leaf motif reappears as a sgraffito fresco incised directly into the plaster.
The existing glass-and-steel greenhouse is now shaded by latticed panels whose pattern recalls the trellises found in botanical gardens, doubling as cantilevered sun-shading canopies that temper the climate inside and immediately outside the structure. Their checkered shadows are echoed underfoot in Verde Alpi marble flooring, while red-lacquered chairs punctuate the otherwise green, plant-filled room like flower bulbs breaking through soil.
Beneath the restaurant, an underground passage connects the pavilion to the historic Villa Roccabruna, offering a sheltered route in bad weather. The route concludes in a timber-lined wine cellar complete with walk-in cabinets and small velvet-lined niches for tasting, a staircase rising directly back up into the restaurant above.
By late evening, once the last omakase plates have been cleared and the stools pushed back until the counter reads as one uninterrupted marble volume, the room carries no visible trace of the breakfast trays that crossed the same surface only hours before.
L’Aria by Herzog & de Meuron | Location: Via Enrico Caronti, 69, 22020 Blevio (CO), Italy — Year: 2026 — Key materials: Botticino and Bianco Perlino marble, Calacatta Oro marble, cast-glass ceiling, Rubelli embroidered fabric panels, dark walnut