Our Story
Emilio Ferrandi built it in 1908 with money made in silk, on a terrace of land his family had farmed for two hundred years. It left the family once, briefly, and it did not go well. This is what happened in between.
1908
Emilio Ferrandi was thirty-one when he bought the mill at Bellano, and thirty-eight when he stopped needing to visit it. The money came quickly, the way it did on the lake in those years, and he spent a good deal of it on a house he intended to die in.
He wanted the western light — the two hours after four o’clock when the sun comes down the far ridge and lands on this shore and nowhere else. So the house faces east across the water, and every principal room takes that light in the afternoon. The kitchen, the laundry and the servants’ stair went on the dark side, which is where they remain.
Construction took eleven months. The masons came from Ossuccio, the ironwork from a forge in Menaggio that is still there, and the terrazzo from a firm in Milan that folded in 1962. Emilio moved in with his wife Giulia in the spring of 1909 and did, in the end, die there — in 1947, in the room that is now number eleven.
1911 Emilio and Giulia Ferrandi on the terrace, three years after the house was finished
The house is finished in eleven months. Emilio and Giulia Ferrandi move in the following spring, with a gardener, a cook and no electricity.
Requisitioned. Forty-one men are billeted in nine rooms for nineteen months. The terrazzo in the hall never entirely recovers, and has been left that way.
Giulia returns alone. Three of the east windows have no glass in them, and stay that way for six years, because glass costs more than she has.
Her son Tomaso lets four rooms to summer guests — mostly German, mostly the same four families, several of whom came back for thirty years.
Chiara Ferrandi, Emilio’s great-granddaughter, takes the house on. She is a structural engineer and has never run a hotel in her life.
Twenty-four rooms. The cellars reopen as a spa. The east windows are glazed at last, in iron frames cast from the 1908 originals.
What we kept
Rather more, of which four
Twenty-nine people work at Maison Aurelle. One of them was here long before it was a hotel, and has opinions about all of it.
“The house was never really mine. I am the one holding it at the moment, that is all.”
Chiara Ferrandi
Fourth generation · Since 2016
“I have never cooked from a fixed menu, and I am not going to start now.”
Elena Vasari
Head chef · Since 2019
“I knew this house before it had any guests in it. It was quieter then, and a great deal colder.”
Rosa Peduzzi
Housekeeper · Since 1994
They are printed on a card in every room, in exactly these words, and they have not changed since we opened.
Breakfast happens when you want it, not between seven and ten.
The dog comes. No charge, no size limit, and there is a bowl in the room already.
Nothing in the room has a price on it. Take what you like and we will settle at the end.
Nobody will ever ring your room to ask how everything is.
If you would rather be left alone, say so once. Everyone will know by lunchtime.
In print
“A house that has quite deliberately decided not to behave like a hotel, and is very much the better for it.”
The Continental· Autumn 2024
Come and see
Emilio built the whole house around it. You are welcome to come and decide whether he was right.
