Luxury Hotels Atlas / Places / Italy / Peschiera del Garda / Vision Hotel
Vision Hotel
Peschiera del Garda, Italy · Independent · Accessible Luxury
Alberto Apostoli's studio built this one out of cross-laminated timber and steel in 2019: three low floors on the Peschiera shoreline with the balconies deliberately knocked out of alignment, so the front of the building looks shuffled. Perforated metal screens hang across it at seemingly random angles, and after dark LED strips run up every pillar. Thirty-two rooms sit behind all that, above a planted lakefront park where the pool spills over its edge toward the water. Peschiera's own walls have been on the UNESCO list since 2017, part of Venice's chain of Renaissance fortifications.
- 32 rooms
- Opened 2019
- Architect: Studio Apostoli (Alberto Apostoli)
About Vision Hotel
- The frame is XLam cross-laminated timber tied into steel, which makes the building seismically flexible and quiet, and the roof carries photovoltaic and solar thermal panels that also feed three car chargers.
- The Panoramic Suite opens onto a fifty-square-metre private terrace facing straight down the lake.
History
Vision Hotel is a new building, not a conversion. It was designed by Studio Apostoli of Verona for Orodent S.r.l., built by Rubner Objectbau, and inaugurated on 23 March 2019 on Strada Bergamini at Peschiera del Garda, a few metres from the beach at the southern end of the lake.
The structure is unusual for a hotel: an XLam cross-laminated timber frame integrated with steel, which gives the building seismic flexibility along with thermal and acoustic insulation, on a lot of about 6,000 square metres with roughly 1,500 square metres of floor area over three above-ground storeys. The facade is the point. Room balconies are staggered rather than stacked, opening asymmetrical gaps, and expanded-metal sunbreaker panels are set across them in an apparently random arrangement; at night LED strips inside vertical metal profiles pick out every pillar. Photovoltaic and solar thermal panels on the roof also supply three electric car charging points.
There are thirty-two rooms and two apartments, graded four-star superior, with a breakfast room, bar, reading room and the Azdora Café restaurant on the ground floor. Outside, a large deck holds a weir-overflow pool set in a planted lakefront park, with paths edged by gabions packed with lake pebbles. Alberto Apostoli described the brief as light, lightness and a refined simplicity, in a spot where the relationship between sky, lake and land does most of the work.
The setting
Peschiera del Garda sits at the southern tip of the lake where the Mincio river leaves it, and its star-shaped fortress is the reason to look twice: the Venetian defence works here were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2017 as part of the Venetian Works of Defence between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The old town is enclosed by water on every side, with ferry connections up the lake and a station on the Milan to Venice line. Verona airport is about forty-five minutes away, Lazise five minutes up the shore.
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