R Collection: 4 Lake Como Projects for 2027

R Collection Hotels has put names to four Lake Como projects for 2027.

Two familiar Como hotels come back under the group’s own management, and an apartment address arrives at Cernobbio.

The four are Lake Como Palace, EX-C Excelsior Como, Hotel Due Corti and Villa O. Three sit in the city of Como; Villa O is at Cernobbio, ten minutes along the shore.

Due Corti has the clearest date, the second half of 2027. The others carry a 2027 target and nothing more precise.

Two hotels come home

The Rocchi family’s group already owns the Palace Hotel and the Hotel Barchetta Excelsior in Como. Both were run by the Villa d’Este group. R Collection is taking the management back and redeveloping them.

After the work, the Palace becomes Lake Como Palace and the Barchetta Excelsior becomes EX-C Excelsior Como.

That connection matters if you are researching either name. Everything written about those two hotels until now, the photographs, the reviews, the room descriptions, belongs to a different operation. None of it tells you what the relaunched hotels will be.

The Palace occupies an Art Nouveau building on Lungo Lario Trieste, in the historic centre. The address is half the story. This is a redevelopment inside the working life of a city, not an estate hidden behind gates on a stretch of shoreline. What the finished hotel will actually offer has not been announced.

Villa O is not another hotel

Cernobbio gets something structurally different. Villa O is being developed as a series of apartments rather than as a conventional hotel.

Which changes the questions worth asking. Layouts, minimum stays, whether housekeeping is daily, what access residents have to the group’s other facilities: none of that has been published, and all of it decides whether the format suits a family or a fortnight.

For anyone weighing several nights at Cernobbio, this is the one to watch. The balance between private space and hotel support will matter more than the name over the door.

There is a comparison already available on that shore. Our report on Villa d’Este’s Miralago apartments covers the same idea at the same address in the village, and it is a separate project with no connection to this announcement.

Where it sits in the group

R Collection is not arriving on the lake. It already runs Grand Hotel Victoria Concept and Spa at Menaggio, plus Villa Cipressi, the Royal Victoria and Casa Du Lac at Varenna.

So the 2027 programme widens the choice of bases rather than introducing a new operator to the destination. Como and Cernobbio join Menaggio and Varenna, which puts the group on both the western shore and the head of the lake.

For a traveller, the choice between them starts with geography and not with the group name. Menaggio and Varenna are ferry country, mid-lake, twenty minutes from Bellagio by water. Como is a city with a station, a cathedral, restaurants that stay open in February and a funicular. Cernobbio is neither, and that is its whole appeal.

That is also the logic behind our Lake Como hotel guide. A hotel chosen for four days spent mostly on its own grounds answers a completely different brief from a base for a week of restaurant bookings and villa visits.

The staff house is the interesting part

Alongside the four hotels the group announced something less photogenic: a staff residence at Menaggio.

Two hundred and forty-three beds, across 124 rooms with private bathrooms. Communal areas, kitchens, a games room, a laundry, outdoor space to sit in. Paolo Cozzolino of GLA Genius Loci Architettura designed it.

Ludovica Rocchi, the group’s brand director, put the reasoning plainly.

The quality of hospitality begins with the quality of life of the people who make it possible.

She is right, and on Lake Como the point is sharper than it sounds. Seasonal staff on that shoreline compete for housing with the tourism that employs them, in a market where a summer let earns more in a week than a chambermaid makes in a month. Hotels that cannot house their people cannot keep them, and a hotel that changes its floor staff every June never gets good.

Take it as an investment worth noting, not as evidence. It tells you the group has understood the problem. It does not tell you the four hotels will be well run in 2027.

Two appointments came with it

Riccardo Bortolotti becomes Area General Manager for Lake Como. Thomas Schmidt takes over as General Manager of the Grand Hotel Victoria at Menaggio.

Structural appointments usually arrive before a build-out rather than after it, and this pair reads that way: somebody has been put in charge of the lake as a whole, ahead of four openings that will need coordinating across two shores.

What is still missing

Dates: only Due Corti has one, and it is a half-year.
Room counts: not published for any of the four.
Villa O: apartment sizes, minimum stays, services, what comes with the booking.
The two Como hotels: what the redevelopment actually changes, and how long each closes for.
Restaurants: no chef, no concept, no dining programme announced.
Rates: nothing, which is normal at this distance.

Luxury.it perspective

Four names and a staff house is a plan, not a season. Nobody should be building an early 2027 trip around any of these.

What the announcement does tell you is where the group is pointing. Two city hotels it already owned, taken back from another operator and rebuilt. An apartment address in the one village on the lake that has never needed to advertise. And, underneath all of it, 243 beds for the people who will run them.

The next announcement worth waiting for is the one that turns these four names into arrival dates, room counts and something you can actually book.