Sustainability
The building itself
Putting up a new hotel of this size, on this site, would have released somewhere near fourteen hundred tonnes of carbon before a single guest arrived. The restoration came to about a hundred and ninety, most of it in the lift shaft and the plant room.
We did not keep the house for that reason. Chiara kept it because it was her family’s and taking it down was unthinkable to her. But it is the largest number on this page by a distance, and it was settled before any of the rest of this began.
Both figures are estimates from the same engineer, using the same method, in 2019. Neither has been independently audited, and we would not claim they are accurate to the tonne.
An oil boiler dropped into the cellar in 1974, and about eleven thousand litres of oil a year to feed it.
Twelve closed loops under the lower lawn and one heat pump in the plant room. Nothing burns on this site now except the pizza oven.
It runs on grid electricity, which in Italy is still around forty per cent fossil. The roof is listed and we have been refused solar twice.
Mains water for everything, including the garden, which in August is most of it.
Rain off nine hundred square metres of roof into two tanks under the orchard. It does the garden, the lavatories and the laundry.
Not the pool and not the kitchen. Both need treatment we have looked at twice and have not costed properly either time.
Whatever was here in 2016, which was mostly halogen and a great deal more of it than anybody needed.
LED throughout, on the 1908 circuits wherever they were sound. Everything outside goes off at midnight and does not come back until dusk.
The cellars are lit around the clock because of the damp sensors. We have not found a way round it that does not put the vaults at risk.
Perch, lavarello, shad
Two boats out of Menaggio
6km
Vegetables, April to October
The kitchen garden
0km
Everything green, the rest of the year
Two growers at Griante
4km
Bread and pastry
Baked here, twice daily
0km
Cheese
Four dairies, Val Sassina
31km
Beef, pork, guinea fowl
One butcher in Brianza
38km
Wine
Fifty-one growers on the list
44km avg
Flour, coffee, olive oil, salt
Not local, and never going to be
Eleven hundred square metres, which sounds like a great deal and feeds the house for roughly four months of the year. It is not a farm and we would rather not describe it as one.
Landfill fell by two thirds because the kitchen stopped buying things in plastic trays, not because of anything clever. Food waste goes to two pigs at Griante, which is not a metaphor.
One
The pool is heated to thirty degrees in a building that spends the rest of its energy trying to use less.
On its own it is about a fifth of the electricity bill. We have discussed closing it from November to March three times, and three times we have not done it, because people book rooms here in February for the pool. That is the whole reason. It is not a good one.
Two
Most guests still arrive by car, and we have not solved that either.
There are two chargers behind the house and both are slow — seven kilowatts, which is four hours for a useful amount. A third and a faster one have been quoted for twice. The quote is not the problem; the supply to the site is. We are told 2027, and we have been told that before.
Three
Our guests fly here, and we do not offset it.
A return flight from London is roughly four times the carbon of everything else about a two-night stay put together — the room, the heat, the food, the laundry, all of it. We do not buy offsets and we are not going to start, having read enough about what most of them actually deliver. We would rather give you the number than sell you a tree.
We looked at three schemes in 2023. Two of them award points for things this house cannot do — a new-build envelope, a fleet of vehicles, a written policy on a subject the four of us settle over lunch.
The third was a good deal better and costs eleven thousand euros a year, which is roughly what the ground loop saves us. We could not make that arithmetic work.
This page. It is added up in the first week of February, when the previous year’s meter readings and delivery notes are totalled, and it is published whichever way the numbers went.
One of them has already gone the wrong way, and it is still on the page above rather than quietly removed from it.
Last totalled · 4 February 2026
