THE COMMUNICATION EXECUTIVES Ase Botha and Gustaf Brusewitz both grew up in Sweden but had barely lived there since meeting as young professionals in Brussels some 20 years ago. Their careers at global technology companies took them to London and Sydney, where they had their second child. Then, during the pandemic, their work brought them home to Stockholm, where the family resettled in Nacka, a suburban area known for its enviable access to lakes and forests, making a country home redundant. Still, having lived abroad for most of the past two decades, “we felt we needed somewhere to escape,” says Botha, 50.
Ultimately, they chose a faraway place — one that’s about a 24-hour drive to the south, through Denmark, Germany and Switzerland — in the Italian town of Tremezzo, next to Lake Como. When they were in the midst of returning to Scandinavia six years ago, a friend whose lakeside home they’d vacationed at over the years sent the couple a curious listing for a ground-floor apartment inside a grand neo-Classical-style villa, built around 1885, which had an overgrown garden with a worn wrought-iron pergola and a centuries-old clock crowning its gracefully arched yellow stucco facade, overlooking a stately park. Brusewitz and Botha agreed to put in an offer without first visiting it. “Given what the building is like from the outside, you could see that if you just took everything away and tried to make it look as it did in the past, it would look nice no matter what,” Botha says. “It already had these beautiful windows.”
Once they began renovating the 1,500-square-foot apartment, often working remotely with their friend’s contractor and engineer, Gianluca Tosti, to reverse nearly all of what the previous owners had changed over 50 years, the duo discovered one pleasant surprise after another: Behind a formerly lowered ceiling was an ornate floral fresco that accented the tops of the 13-foot-high rooms; on the floors, they unearthed old terrazzo, partly hidden under vinyl; in the basement, they found heavy wooden doors that could easily be reinstalled. Even their private portion of the garden, accessible directly from the living room, turned out to be some 4,000 square feet.
They had the plot replanted and the home’s decorative elements carefully restored to “bring it all back to the skeleton,” says Brusewitz, 52, “but the two nonnegotiables were two bedrooms and two bathrooms.” Eventually, after driving back and forth several times from Sweden, stopping along the way to ski in the Alps or tour various cities with their children, now 9 and 13, they met Studio Navet’s Lina Huring, a Swedish architect who’d recently relocated to Milan. She helped Botha reconceive the floor plan, which now has a pair of rooms with lofted mezzanine sleeping quarters and a new bathroom behind the sitting room, near a hallway that leads to a few closets and a kitchen with new fixtures softened by creamy marble counters, off-white tiled backsplashes and gray terrazzo floors. The appliances aside, “we had this idea that we didn’t want to buy new things, so the only new things are the beds and the sofa,” Botha says. Instead, nearly all the furniture had been inherited from their families over the years and kept in storage, while some of the larger wooden pieces (a dining table and chairs in the main room, a mirrored armoire in the primary suite) were sourced from Piedmontese flea markets.
ALTHOUGH THE COUPLE had taken on less complicated overhauls before — they redid their 1920s-era Stockholm place in a maximalist 1970s style earlier this decade — Botha insists she’s not so much obsessed with design, per se, as with finding “the feeling of the house. What’s always interested me is how you can create a space that you want to be in.” Here, that meant taking cues less from Como’s flashier side and more from its “mountains and old culture,” she says, having adopted the regional palette of pistachio green, carnation pink and butter yellow for the textured plastered walls, and placed vintage ceramic jugs and crocheted bedspreads in each room.
“Obviously I enjoy beautiful things,” Brusewitz adds. “But it’s the historical part that appeals to me.” The building, which is now divided into 10 units, is next to a neo-Baroque stone fountain and outdoor stairway that were conceived by the Italian rationalist architect Pietro Lingeri, who’d been commissioned by Roberto Meier, a Swiss merchant, who purchased the lakefront parcel in 1918. The dwelling’s current name, Villa Anna, was purportedly given in the early 20th century, when the enclave’s land and property were divided among several owners, a fact Brusewitz learned while researching at the Lake Como Landscape Museum down the hill.
It’s that process of discovery that can make historical home renovation so exciting. “I think my mind likes to be in the state of having this kind of project,” Botha says. Even if working in a new country hasn’t always gone as the couple expected. Unlike in Sweden, where one or two companies would have probably overseen all the construction, there were separate artisanal subcontractors for every aspect: “One for the roof, one for the kitchen, one for the tiles, one for the bathroom, one for the doors,” Brusewitz says. And eventually, when all these handymen would arrive, “they’d always turn to Gustaf first,” Botha adds, rolling her eyes. “It’s hard to convince them they should talk to me.”