We were lucky enough to be staying at Il Sereno during the Salone del Mobile last April, and the contrast could not have been more complete. Milan, forty minutes away, was doing what Milan does during that week: loud, brilliant, exhausting, every restaurant booked three weeks in advance and every conversation conducted at a slight shout. Then the car turned off the Statale Regina and down to the water at Torno, and all of that fell away.
There is a particular quality of light that belongs only to Lake Como in the early evening, when the sun drops behind the mountains and the water turns the colour of warm honey. Il Sereno has always understood this. Now, ten years on from its quietly revolutionary opening, the hotel is leaning into that understanding more deliberately than ever. The 2026 season brought with it Al Tramonto, a new outdoor dining concept that does exactly what the name promises. Just five tables, positioned beyond the terrace with an unobstructed view of the water. Candles, not theatre. Executive Chef Raffaele Lenzi has developed a menu specifically for this setting, taking Italian classics and stripping them back to something lighter, more precise, more honest. You book in advance, you dress for the evening, and you eat as the mountains swallow the sun. Weather permitting, naturally. There is something rather wonderful about a luxury hotel that still answers to the sky.
Lenzi’s broader culinary world at Il Sereno Al Lago continues to hold its Michelin star, as it has since 2018, and this anniversary year brings a retrospective tasting menu drawing on a decade of the kitchen’s defining dishes. His philosophy has always placed vegetables at the centre rather than the margin, and the menus Contrasti, Classici and the remarkable Vegetali, Tuberi e Radici remain the backbone of the restaurant’s reputation.
The hotel itself was designed by Patricia Urquiola, and it remains one of the more considered acts of architecture on the lake’s shores. Where so much of Como’s luxury vocabulary reaches for the operatic, the Villa d’Este instinct for frescoed grandeur and theatrical gardens, Il Sereno chose restraint. Clean lines, warm materials, 40 suites all oriented toward the water, each with floor-to-ceiling windows and a furnished terrace large enough to actually use. The design has not aged. It has, if anything, become more itself.
Two new highlights add further texture to what was already a remarkably layered proposition. The Lake-to-Lake journey, developed in collaboration with Kulm Hotel St. Moritz, is an itinerary rather than a transfer. Guests travel the alpine route between Como and the Engadin by vintage car or sports car, accompanied by a bespoke soundtrack curated by Arman Naféei, the Kulm’s Directeur d’Ambiance. Two nights at each hotel frame the journey. It is, in its way, a very considered answer to the question of how to move between two extraordinary places without simply moving.
Then there is the Darsena Listening Suite, which is perhaps the most idiosyncratic room on the lake. Built on the principles of the Japanese listening room, it is dedicated to the experience of recorded music played back through rare analogue equipment, vintage valve amplifiers, restored reel-to-reel machines, a vinyl collection curated by the hotel’s owner Luis Contreras spanning decades of music history. The walls are sound-insulated. The furniture is walnut, made to measure. The view is the lake. It accommodates up to ten people for private events, or simply one person with a record they want to hear properly. We spent an evening in there after returning from a dinner in Bellagio, and it was precisely the kind of thing that makes you reconsider what a hotel can be for.
