Tuckey Design Studio Resurrects an Abandoned Concrete Shell Above Lake Como

Renovation projects along Lake Como tend to lean into a predictable register: whitewashed surfaces, polished minimalism, the genteel hush of high-end hospitality. Tuckey Design Studio's Casabella di Como does something more interesting. Starting from a deteriorating concrete shell perched above the lake's shoreline, the London-based studio kept the raw honesty of the existing structure and layered it with a palette drawn directly from Lombardy's landscape. The result is a 183-square-meter, two-bedroom villa that feels rooted in its terrain rather than merely placed upon it.

What makes this project worth studying is the discipline of its material choices. Green-stained oak paneling runs through kitchens, bedrooms, and corridors, making a deliberate tonal connection to the rolling hills visible from nearly every room. Polished concrete floors inlaid with marble pick up the reflective quality of the lake itself. Marble columns do structural work but also serve as sculptural anchors throughout the plan. None of these moves are arbitrary. Each material decision ties the interior back to the specific geography outside the glass.

Two Wings, One Landscape

The villa splits into two distinct wings connected by a glazed corridor that runs between a pair of planted courtyards. The lake-facing volume contains the open-plan living spaces: kitchen, dining, and a living room that spills out toward a terrace pool. The rear wing houses bedrooms, bathrooms, and utility spaces, organized around a cylindrical vestibule lined in oak. This separation is more than organizational. It establishes a clear threshold between public and private life, with the glass corridor acting as a decompression chamber between the two.

The courtyards on either side of the glazed link introduce light and air into the center of the plan, preventing the kind of dark interior corridors that plague many mid-century villas adapted for contemporary living. Native grasses and gravel beds fill these courtyards, keeping the planted palette low and deliberately wild against the precision of the architecture.

Concrete Ceiling as Protagonist

Tuckey Design Studio made a decisive move by exposing and celebrating the existing concrete soffit rather than concealing it behind plasterboard. The textured underside of the original structure floats above the kitchen and living spaces, its rough surface contrasting sharply with the smooth oak cabinetry and honed marble surfaces below. This is the project's central tension, and the studio leans into it fully.

In the kitchen, sage green cabinetry and a marble-and-oak island sit beneath this muscular ceiling as if furniture has been placed inside an infrastructure. The effect is surprisingly warm. Morning light enters through floor-to-ceiling glazing and washes across the concrete, softening its industrial character. It is a strategy that respects the original building's bones while making clear that something fundamentally different is happening within them.

Green Oak and the Lombardy Palette

The green-stained oak is the project's signature material, and it earns that status through repetition and restraint. It appears as kitchen shelving displaying ceramic bowls, as paneled cabinetry with recessed finger pulls, as corridor walls and bedroom joinery. The stain is a muted sage that reads as an extension of the Lombardy hillside visible through every window. It never fights the concrete overhead or the marble underfoot; it mediates between them.

The color connection is not superficial. Tuckey Design Studio clearly studied the specific greens of the surrounding landscape and calibrated the stain to sit within that range across seasons. Images from autumn show yellow and amber foliage through the glazing, and the green oak serves as a stable chromatic anchor while the world outside shifts.

Living Spaces That Open to the Lake

The lake-facing volume is designed around transparency. Floor-to-ceiling glass doors open onto a terrace, with wool sheer curtains providing a soft filter between the living room and the outdoors. A terracotta armchair and low black coffee table occupy the room without crowding it. The furnishing strategy is deliberately sparse, letting the view and the architecture do the work.

Dark green marble columns punctuate the space, their veined surfaces catching afternoon light in ways that shift throughout the day. Through the sheers, these columns register as silhouettes against the glazed courtyard beyond, creating layered depth in a relatively compact footprint. The living spaces feel larger than their square meters suggest because they are always in visual dialogue with something beyond their walls.

The Private Wing: Timber, Stone, and Ritual

The bedroom wing shifts register entirely. Slatted timber ceilings replace exposed concrete, and the spatial sequence becomes more intimate: aligned doorways create long sightlines through bedrooms and corridors, but each threshold is carefully framed so that rooms feel distinct rather than continuous. A built-in oak desk faces full-height glazing and bare winter trees, turning a workspace into something approaching contemplation.

Bathrooms and ensuite passages introduce travertine walls, mosaic floors, and fluted glass partitions. A green marble vanity in one ensuite passage carries the project's chromatic identity into the most private spaces. These are not afterthought rooms. The same material discipline that governs the public wing extends here, with every surface and joint considered as part of the larger composition.

Details That Accumulate

The close-up images of Casabella di Como reveal a project built on the accumulation of careful details rather than a single heroic gesture. Recessed finger pulls in oak veneer cabinetry are lit by integrated LED strips, a small move that eliminates hardware while creating a subtle glow at the point of contact. Tapered timber chair legs rest on chequered terrazzo tiles. A dark green marble column shows the geological specificity of the stone chosen, its veining patterns as much a part of the design intent as any drawn line.

These moments matter because they demonstrate that the project's material palette was not selected from a mood board and applied wholesale. Each element was chosen for its specific visual and tactile qualities, then deployed where those qualities could do the most work. Craft at this scale is what separates a renovation from a transformation.

Water as Horizon Line

The terrace pool, photographed at dusk with submerged steps and recessed lighting, sits as a foreground plane that extends the polished concrete floors outward. Its still surface mirrors the sky and creates a visual connection to the lake below, collapsing the distance between the domestic interior and the vast landscape. This is the project's most explicitly scenic move, and it works because it is earned by the restraint elsewhere.

Inside, a curved partition wall in one room frames a mountain view through a picture window, turning landscape into a composed image. A dining nook with vertical timber paneling, a built-in bench, and a suspended black pendant creates a counterpoint: a space that deliberately turns inward, offering refuge from the panorama. The villa oscillates between these two modes, openness and enclosure, and that rhythm gives it a spatial richness that a uniformly transparent plan never could.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals Casabella di Como's position within a hillside settlement along the Como waterfront, with the villa occupying a sloped plot above a network of narrow roads. The floor plan makes the two-wing organization legible: bedrooms and private rooms cluster to the left, connected by the cylindrical vestibule, while the open-plan kitchen and living volume occupies the right, oriented toward the lake. The glazed corridor between them reads clearly as a joint rather than a seam, a transparent element that holds the two halves together without merging them.

Why This Project Matters

Lake Como has no shortage of villa renovations, many of them handsomely executed, most of them interchangeable. What Tuckey Design Studio has done here is tie a renovation to its specific place through material choices that go beyond the cosmetic. Green-stained oak is not a trend color; it is a response to the greens visible from every window. Exposed concrete is not an aesthetic preference; it is an acknowledgment of what was already there. The project resists the temptation to erase the original structure's character and instead builds a new identity on top of it.

At 183 square meters, Casabella di Como is also a lesson in doing more with less. The two-wing plan, the glazed corridor, the courtyards, and the pool create a spatial complexity that far exceeds what the footprint might suggest. Every room has a view, a material strategy, and a clear relationship to the rooms around it. For architects working on lakeside or hillside renovations, this project offers a model: respect the shell, read the landscape, and let the materials do the talking.

Casabella di Como by Tuckey Design Studio. Located in Lombardy, Italy. 183 m². Completed in 2023. Photography by Dario Borruto.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.