The Venice Venice Hotel

Why book?

For a mix of heritage, craft and glamour in a world-class setting, with every sensory frill you could wish for (and some you might only come up with in a dream about Canaletto).

Set the scene

Venice Venice is along the Grand Canal – just as it curves to reveal the Rialto Bridge. Approaching the property by water in a wooden motor launch from Marco Polo airport, you weave sleekly for some 20 minutes across the lagoon – that enclosed bay of the Adriatic sea, water a milky blue – past empty islands, and Great Egrets balancing on vertical wooden ‘bricole’ poles studying the water. Narrowing as you enter the city itself, the lagoon suddenly becomes a maze of waterways and semi-decaying palaces. Washing strung on balconies, blistered shutters, pealing church bells: if Venice is the most rapturously immersive city, this is the apex of immersive approaches to any hotel. You step off the boat and directly onto the hotel’s open terrace – partly a restaurant, where diners merely continue their conversations, such coming and going from the water out of bobbing speedboats entirely unremarkable (note: those chary of boats can arrive more sedately by land and take the courtyard entrance.) Glancing up, the edifice of the palace – peak Venetian-Byzantine style – with its high narrow arches and decorative carving speaks of tremendous age. But step inside and the picture shifts. The original architecture of the interior has been retained but is also now a canvas for an integral modern art collection.

The backstory

Venice Venice is the first hotel owned and designed by art collectors and designers Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo, the husband and wife who established the Golden Goose brand of sneakers. They watched with a growing sense of doom as the 50-year abandoned landmark Ca’da Mosto Palace – the oldest building along the Grand Canal and likely the oldest stone building in all of Venice – entered what looked like terminal decline after the high waters of the canal breached its basement. Established in the 11^th century, the Ca’da Mosto had changed hands and identities many times – it was once a hospital and even a hotel whose guests included Mozart, Voltaire, Shelley and Turner. Gallo and Rinaldo have retained its history whilst strictly avoiding any trappings of pastiche with a vast and meticulous restoration, first sealing the lower-level floors and installing holding tanks beneath the hotel to catch any flood water. They mended intricate 300-year-old ceilings in one salon while leaving the evocative outline of former doors visible in another. Some interior walls have been limewashed on open brickwork. Stone corridors are lined with newly woven tapestries shot with metallic thread, making flat walls soft and three-dimensional. In a blend of utility and pomp, every space includes something custom-made that might stop you in your tracks - hand-painted wallpaper, a mosaic floor, or a little bar reminiscent of a spaceship. Nothing feels generic.

The rooms

Forty-three bedrooms (some with quiet internal courtyard views, some overlooking the busier water and views of the Rialto Bridge) include a series of impressive suites, one with a panoramic terrace. Much thought and craftsmanship has been put into the materials and positioning of all the bathrooms in the hotel. Some suites have their own steam room. An apartment on the ground floor spreads over 200 metres (the largest suite in the city) with its own pontoon for a boat and two marble bathtubs that have been in the building for centuries, still perfect. Each room, whether communal or personal, has its own distinct personality and is full of the owners’ vast art collection and special commissions. The work includes Bruce Nauman, Christo, Yoko Ono, and (most strikingly) the brilliant Italian black-and-white photographer of cities, Renato D'Agostin, who is the true master of the darkroom. Pointedly, there’s no sense of being in a gallery where everything is untouchable. I stayed in a room featuring work by the mysterious German environmentalist and performance artist Joseph Beuys, who, in 1974, spent three days in a gallery in New York entwined in a blanket with a shepherd’s crook protruding above his head while a live coyote played with a discarded glove. Which might not sound particularly restful, when in fact, the collection of witty images of and by the artist quickly felt comfortably my own. I unplugged and hung out in Beuys’s world, quickly noting that everything else in the room (vast bed, sofa, mirrors, dressing table) had been positioned to reflect the glister and light bouncing off the Grand Canal directly below and up through the suite’s tall windows. Outside looks like a moving Canaletto, especially at dusk when kids slouched on the other side of the canal, cooling off after a hot day with their feet dangling into the water. Canaletto was known to have used one of the floors above in the Palace to work in, so this, thrillingly, was his actual view.

Food and drink

Outstanding. The hotel’s restaurant on the ground floor spills through ancient stone arches onto a waterside terrace and is open to anyone who wants to visit all day, so the place has an egalitarian hum that ebbs and flows. Get to breakfast early and watch the canal wake up over a sharp espresso and fresh pastry: first, the fishermen chug past, then the crates of veg and yoghurt arrive on the water for the Rialto market opposite. Eat inside instead and the big glass doors and windows instil a luminosity, accentuating the water’s proximity. The menu is stylish, fresh, and bright. A lunchtime pea risotto tasted just-podded and grassy-sweet. A tomato salad with burrata was a mad pop of colours: the impossible whiteness of the cheese, the fruity yellow and jammy red of the tomatoes (of the bold, balsamic kind you only ever get in Italy). In the afternoon, the hotel’s bakery produces traditional frittelle, local Carnival pastries made savoury, especially nice with a cocktail using the hotel’s own vermouth with lagoon herbs (the Venice Bitter Club, open only to residents in an upstairs salon, serves great cocktails from behind a bar that looks a little like a spaceship). Nights on the dining terrace are very special. All the hotel now is lit with candles, so even the walk to the table itself feels like an unfolding discovery of the various different spaces. There’s excellent seafood, as you would expect – particularly the sardines served in the Venetian style, with raisins and pine nuts big as clout nails. There’s gnocchi that caramelises into duck ragu. As the evening winds down, Venetians come and go along the canal in their own small boats with outboard motors, rippling water reflecting in the candlelight, and the ancient carving of the hotel’s façade, a Byzantine shimmer.

The spa

Here’s (surely) a first. Creating the hotel’s just-opened spa, Romanian sculptor and embroidery artist Victoria Zidaru has stuffed large woven fabric tubes full of herbs and flowers from her garden and positioned them in a site-specific installation up the walls and along the ceiling of the treatment room to create a structure that felt like being deep inside the wholesome and benign root system of a forest. The tactile creamy fabric all around, subtly emanating a fragrance of camomile and calendula, makes for a unique fantasy space for any massage or facial. Treatments are tailored to how you’re feeling, with an emphasis on touch rather than machines. Adjacent, in a small wellness area, a new pool sits at the same level as the canal (the only such pool in Venice). Gondoliers heedlessly pass the window as you take a dip – a playful kind of detail that David Hockney would approve of. Altogether, this spa is pure serenity, a sensory sanctuary. I stayed during the Venice Film Festival, where I was attending an event: an intense and very humid late-summer day spent in excruciating heels and a too-tight dress. The bliss of the fragrance and quiet of the steam room when I got back after midnight – using cleansing clays and oils left for me by the spa therapist – is something I will not forget in a hurry.

The neighbourhood

Slap-bang central Venice historic city, so what’s not to love, providing you can negotiate the crowded streets and bridges during the dog days of summer. It’s a ten-minute walk to St Mark’s Square in one direction, and the glorious Rialto food market is just over the water, selling every kind of pasta and parts of octopus imaginable, lagoon fishermen hauling boxes off boats wearing massive boots whilst permanently gesturing in argument into their phones.

The service

The front desk is a font of wisdom on all modes of transport, places to visit or back routes to take through the streets whilst also being tactful enough to notice that sometimes you just want to sit in reception for ten minutes, wondering how on earth you are going to get through the day in these goddamn heels. Most impressive are the porters who wrangle massive suitcases as though they were bagatelles, on and off bobbing boats, close to waiters and waitresses gliding between tables without a glance. All staff seem to be perpetually, usefully, gently in motion.

For families

There is no kids club at the hotel, but babysitting contacts can be provided. The city itself is probably best for children who are at least past the danger-to-themselves stage, but three loft suites in the hotel accommodate children. Room 21 has a cinema projector in the children’s mezzanine space.

Eco effort

Stone, linen, cotton, water – natural fabrics and elements are evidently central to the interior design. In the bathrooms, products are dispensed in glass or recycled aluminium tubes or cans. Any produce in the restaurant is sourced locally. With the restoration of such a neglected historic property, the whole purpose of Venice Venice has intrinsically been recycling on an eye-watering scale. The dedication of installing vast tanks beneath the hotel (digging deep down into the clay of the lagoon) in order to mitigate flooding threatened by climate change indicates a fierce desire to establish something beautiful, strong, and with a chance of lasting.

Accessibility

Three bedrooms are designed with reduced mobility in mind, but ramps, slides and lifts are all in use across the hotel, making large areas accessible for wheelchairs (a rarity in Venice). Approach through the courtyard entrance in a wheelchair and you could be waterside at the restaurant with a menu on your lap within minutes.

Anything left to mention?

The old, wide, sotoportego passageway connecting the entrance courtyard and the canal terrace is a boutique, the Venice Mart, selling in-house EROSE products. They have a scent of rose that’s intense but not cloying and edged with carnation flowers and sandalwood, very Scheherazade and covetable. Don’t leave the city without walking the warren of streets surrounding the hotel and noting that only in Venice and Palermo do old hat shops remain and shops for feather-light leather glove and tie shops with the mannequin heads of Italian gentlemen with 1950s salt and pepper haircuts and devastating pre-hipster moustaches.