Villa Favorita, Cultural heritage villa in Castagnola, Switzerland

Villa Favorita is an elegant residence on the Lake Lugano shore in Castagnola with sprawling gardens and several outbuildings. The estate covers a generous area with subtropical vegetation and sits directly at the waterline.

The estate was acquired in 1932 by German art collector Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who transformed it into his home and repository for his valuable art collection. This connection between residence and art storage made the villa an important cultural site of that era.

From the 1930s the villa held a private picture gallery of about twenty rooms, arranged by school and period after the model of Munich's Neue Pinakothek. Margit von Batthyány, daughter of Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, fled the Red Army from Rechnitz in Austria and lived at the villa until her death in 1989.

The villa and its terraced historic park are private and not accessible; since 2013 the estate has belonged to the Invernizzi family. Views of the lakefront facades and the grounds are possible from the public shore paths around Castagnola, where local debate continues over access to the lakeside routes.

In the 1980s an international competition for the villa's expansion was won by the firm Stirling & Wilford, but the project never received the necessary building permits and was not built. The archive of that unbuilt design survives, including web-archived documentation.