Lake Orta's Hidden Gem Hotel: La Darbia Blends Nature, Craft And Calm

Forbes

7 days ago

The bar in La Darbia's kitchen garden Tobias Kaser Photography
In the moneyed enclaves north of Milan, it's easy to go glam. But even in Lake Orta, it's harder to go genuine.
Finding a classically trained woodworker who crafts and restores Louis XIV furniture is relatively simple. It's hard, however, to find one who makes more humble household objects. It's rare to find one who find the potential in weathered old wood, rusted door locks and armchairs whose seats have cratered under the weight of a thousand heavy conversations. But Gian Carlo and Matteo Primatesta, the architect brothers behind Piedmont's utterly peaceful La Darbia hotel, have found one.
They've been working Flavio Bettio—a 60-something woodworker who learned the craft decades ago from his father—for years and years now. He's one of the last holdouts from the days when everyday people went to the village carpenter instead of the suburban Ikea.
It's all delightfully analog. And it's made Bettio the go-to for Studio Primatesta's architectural commissions—luxury villas and small tourism projects around the brothers' native Lake Orta, and especially for La Darbia, the hotel they opened in 2012.
Flavio Bettio's table in La Darbia's cantina Tobias Kaser Photography
The hotel is a full-scale embodiment of the carpenter's artistry—and the architects' firm commitment to simple things done well. It's beautiful in its functionality. In its honesty. In its humility. (It also has its share of invisible upgrades, like magnets on the wardrobe latches to silently keep them closed without interrupting the fantasy of time travel to simpler days.)
The unembellished style is well suited for Lake Orta, the quietly beautiful but shy little sister of northern Italy's more glamorous resort towns. Lake Orta doesn't attract the jet-set bourgeoisie who check into the palace hotels of Lake Maggiore, nor the moneyed German speakers who surround Lake Garda, nor the Americans who still joke about searching for George Clooney in Lake Como.
What it has instead is a deeply peaceful atmosphere, the charming medieval village of Orta San Giulio, Belle Époque promenades and those magical Alpine lake twilights when the village lights begin to twinkle on the water's surface. In the center of the lake, a short boat ride from the village harbor, Isola San Guilio is home to a few dozen Benedictine nuns, who live in a seminary that dates from 1840, and a smattering of posh holiday homes. (It's about an hour from Milan and even closer to the Swiss border.) Even in June, it's all alive but not overrun.
Dinner at La Darbia, overlooking Lake Orta Tobias Kaser Photography
La Darbia sits on a hill just above Orta San Giulio. Apart from a historic stone tower, the estate was abandoned farmland that was being reclaimed by nature when the Primatesta brothers heard about it from a client. 'We had the idea to buy it and do something with it,' recalls Gian Carlo. 'But we had no idea what.'
The plan came about for two reasons. They had been impressed by the simple, village-style hotels they had seen—something lacking around Lake Orta—on their vacations to places like Tuscany and Provence. And they discovered they genuinely liked hospitality: They had already built and opened 20 serviced apartments on their land when their father gave one of the brothers a pizza oven for his birthday. The family gathered for celebrations at long tables in the gardens, sharing hot pizza and good wine, and it wasn't long before guests asked to join the party.
So they built a restaurant and a separate garden bar, hired servers and a terrific chef, and realized they had a full-on hotel on their hands. But La Darbia is still the sort of informal hideaway that prizes slowness and simplicity, that avoids opulence and that emanates the understated elegance that Italians call sobrio. The construction is elemental. The materials are sturdy. The simplicity intrigues.
A suite Tobias Kaser Photography
'We're doing what we like,' says Matteo, noting that they try to at least walk around the property every day. 'For 20 years, we were only architects. This is something different.'
All 20 of the apartments have nuanced color palettes inspired by nature. Each one faces the gardens, saltwater pool and small plot of grapevines. The lake shimmers below, and on clear mornings, the snowcapped head of Monte Rosa peeks out above. Their terraces or patios are set up with tables for enjoying the picnic breakfast that's delivered each morning—because who wants to get dressed at 8am?—and with lounge chairs for self-evident use.
Once a week, they still go back to the super-simple hospitality of inviting guests to their rustic cantina—complete with a long table made by Bettio—to share Piedmontese cheeses, charcuterie and wines from their cellar, including the nebbiolo that's produced from the estate's little vineyards. The rest of the time, meals are still relaxed but elevated to be destination dining. Most of their clientele comes from Milan, or at least from outside the hotel.
The garden bar and restaurant building Tobias Kaser Photography
In the outdoor bar, café tables and larger, shaded couches are set up around the vegetable plots of the organic kitchen garden. It's a dreamily rustic spot for the top-notch aperitivo that goes along with a selection of local craft beers, regional wines and artful cocktails, many of them infused with herbs and fruits grown on site. There's also a menu of tasty small meals, ranging from caprese salads to vitello tonnato. (They're clearly not sticklers for regionalism, though they do some tasty things with local soft cheese and heritage-breed beef.)
At the main restaurant, which operates fully outdoors whenever possible, charismatic chef Matteo Monfrinotti—who was born in Pavia, just south of Milan—is more of a Piedmont purist. His dishes reflect his deep attachment to the region, including tagliolini bossolasco with sausage from nearby Bra, and a twist on ratatouille that layers sweet and sour vegetables with black truffle and an aromatic sauce.
As good as the food is, the hospitality is even better. The young team in the dining room, especially head waiter Dimitri Romanyuk and section leader Mauro Mulas, are the kind of pros who make good service look effortless, even enjoyable. They make jokes in two or three languages as they're filleting a salt-baked sea bass or flambéing the sauce for the crepes Suzette. And they'll offer conspiratorial encouragement if a guest decides to order the ethereal panna cotta three nights in a row, just for the sake of sampling all three of the house-made sauces that can go with it. (Well, that and the fact that the panna cotta is outstanding even on its own.)
Some of that team, along with the architect-owners and their hardworking carpenter, will be decamping from Lake Orta to an old castle in Chianti soon, where a more Tuscan outpost of La Darbia is slated to open next year. It's a region where there's more competition, to be sure, but it's also where the Primatesta brothers' homespun aesthetic makes perfectly imperfect sense. MORE FROM FORBES Forbes 10 Reasons To Love Bolzano, The Gateway To Italy's Dolomite Mountains By Ann Abel Forbes This New 'Grand Boutique' Hotel In Rome Is A Haven For Design Lovers By Ann Abel Forbes This New Italian Castle Hotel Invites You To Sleep Amid 1,000 Years Of History By Ann Abel