Hotelier Valentina De Santis Is Bringing Lake Como’s Iconic Grand Resort Tremezzo Into The Contemporary Era

Valentina De Santis experienced a somewhat abnormal upbringing. Though most of her friends had been chaotic galavanting by the streets of Milan, touring about Europe with their family members, or doing work a aspect-time work at the area gelateria, she invested her childhood summers running through the storied halls of the legendary Grand Hotel Tremezzo.

Perched atop picturesque Lake Como, the hotel has been a shining jewel of Northern Italy for far more than 100 many years. Throughout its heritage, it’s been a preferred destination of noble people, aristocracy, and earth leaders, like Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill, and it is turned beloved celebs like Greta Garbo and far more not too long ago, George and Amal Clooney into regulars. To contact Grand Hotel Tremezzo an icon would be the understatement of the century—and still, to De Santis, it was basically the place she known as dwelling for three to four months a year. “The hotel was my castle,” she suggests, “and I felt like a princess.”

Although it was originally founded and operated by a area Bellagio person and his wife, Grand Resort Tremezzo adjusted arms in 1973, when Valentina’s grandfather obtained the house. In the about 50 yrs because, the De Santis relatives has not only taken care of, and increased, the hotel’s position as a person of the best in the environment, but they have also helped shape Lake Como as we now know it, the vacation spot that marks so a lot of bucket lists and Instagram feeds, the area in which people close to and considerably desire of someday going to.

And when Valentina was not accurately at the helm for much of the De Santis relatives tenure, she was constantly there, hiding in the kitchen area and taking part in in the back again of property, soaking in each individual little bit of the hotel’s past and current. Even as she lived and breathed hospitality, even though, at the rear of the scenes at Grand Lodge Tremezzo and as a visitor at some of the most gorgeous motels around while traveling with her family members, it was not very clear that she would be stick to in her family’s hotelier footsteps, allow by itself be the 1 to take the Grand into its next era.

“In some way I experienced it in my blood, in my DNA. When traveling, my attention and curiosity was so much focused on the lodges themselves and not only on the places,” De Santis says. “So, I can say that I have often been a resort fanatic! But if I have to convey to the fact, I did not have an understanding of by myself when it was the proper minute to start off.” In fact, it was her father who, though celebrating the hotel’s centenary in 2010, helped her to know that moment was now. “‘We will not see the celebrations of yet another centenary,’ he informed me. ‘We need to have you by our aspect now. Grand Resort Tremezzo requirements a full new vitality to get older whilst experience youthful than at any time,’” she remembers.

And so, with its initial 100 many years solidly in the rearview mirror, the legendary lodge found by itself in new hands—for the very first time in its heritage, a woman’s—when Valentina assumed the role of operator and CEO. Possessing put in so much of her everyday living within the partitions of Grand Lodge Tremezzo, researching the ins and outs of day-to-day lifetime on the assets, she believed she knew specifically what she was acquiring into, but above the final 14 many years, De Santis has gotten to know the hotel nearly fully anew. Through that time, she’s recognized that what truly makes the Grand what it is not its breathtaking sights of Lake Como, its celebrated places to eat and bars, or even its buzzy clientele—at minimum not just all of that. In its place, what definitely sets the lodge aside is the persons operating it.

“For the previous a few generations, my family members has been proudly generating certain that our company practical experience the correct dolce vita,” she suggests. “We really like to add our special flair to every single part of the resort, from the décor and gastronomy to the support, and we place all our electrical power into make the aspiration of the Lake a reality, each and every day.” But what she’s appear to understand given that she commenced working Grand Resort Tremezzo is that this perception of loved ones extends effectively beyond the De Santis title. From the persons who get the job done at the hotel and ensure it capabilities as a very well-oiled device all through the year, to the myriad attendees who return with their beloved kinds each and every calendar year, every human being who touches the resort and is touched by it is a portion of the the Grand spouse and children. “People are seriously what make the Grand Resort Tremezzo special. We are one particular large spouse and children composed of remarkable human beings and experts who have worked for us for a lot of many years, and occasionally even generations, with a person exclusive purpose: earning our attendees feel at house,” Valentina adds. “There is no question about it: a keep with us is a continue to be with our family members.”

Beyond preserving the hotel’s huge legacy, even so, De Santis has also been tasked with bringing it into the fashionable age—a balancing act that may perhaps seem challenging but that she has however embraced with out hesitation. With this objective in intellect, she has expanded on Grand Lodge Tremezzo’s current facilities and amenities to meet up with the wants and needs of tourists today. This features the 2017 opening of T Spa, which residences the property’s very first-at any time wellness and exercise programming and incorporates an Italian white marble hammam and Turkish bathtub. De Santis also observed an opportunity for a different wholly new presenting in current years: to dip the hotel’s toes in the environment of style.

Constructing on the Grand’s reputation for timeless type and its near-knit interactions with the manner elite of the previous and current, not to mention her individual passion for design, the owner launched “Sense of Lake,” a signature boutique with a existence on residence and on the net. The buying spot is impressed by the record and craftsmanship of Lake Como and is meticulously curated by Valentina and her mother, Antonella De Santis, to capture the special working experience and sensibility of equally Grand Lodge Tremezzo and its new sister resort across the lake, Passalacqua. Considering that its start, “Sense of Lake” has collaborated with a selection of acclaimed designers and makes, including Bric’s, Borsalino, Superga, and Le Ninè, and this summer, the boutique will unveil new womenswear items in collaboration with celebrated New Zealand designer Emilia Wickstead. Grand Hotel Tremezzo’s growth into style has also led to the creation of Aqua Como, a line of signature fragrances focused to the two properties, whose products are accessible to attendees not only all through their remain but also for purchase so that they can transportation themselves back to Como, and the memories they’ve made there, with just one scent.

But De Santis refuses to quit there. In addition to the start of T Spa and “Sense of Lake,” as properly as a recent renovation of 30 lakefront rooms and a new extremely-lavish rooftop-ground suites, Grand Hotel Tremezzo carries on to innovate its offerings with each and every new time, catering to the ever-switching requirements of today’s tourists whilst preserving its prosperous legacy. “I am particularly proud to have had the honor to transport our historic jewel into the new millennium,” claims the hotelier. “I have generally tried using to uphold the elite custom of vacationing on Lake Como, dealing with our guests, period soon after season, to the final result of our long history, even though at the exact same time surprising them with information and updates that make the resort every single calendar year as well-known as at any time.”

De Santis envisions a different 100 several years, and ideally far more, of Grand Lodge Tremezzo, and despite the fact that she does not pretend to have all the solutions suitable now, she looks to her father’s motto—you have to often raise the bar—as her guiding light-weight. “‘If you can dream it, you can do it’ is our motto,” she claims. “And we’ll hold on dreaming and dreaming.”