Venice’s grand hotels are ruining me for everywhere else

At Airelles Palladio, even going to the loo can improve one’s appreciation of art. An oil painting hangs within contemplation distance of a heated seat with sufficiently intriguing settings to prolong the visit considerably. By the time you have explored the controls, you have had ample opportunity to study the brushwork.

Venice is enjoying a hotel gold rush. Danieli has joined Four Seasons, the French Airelles group has planted its flag on Giudecca, provocatively close to Belmond’s venerable Hotel Cipriani, and the founders of Golden Goose have turned one of the Grand Canal’s oldest palaces into The Venice Venice Hotel. The danger comes afterwards, when another hotel with precisely the same number of stars expects congratulations for bringing a towel.

On my tenth visit, accompanied by my wife and our nine-year-old daughter, Lyra, grand surroundings made small acts of consideration particularly noticeable. Venice can do monumental in its sleep. Making someone comfortable inside a monument requires considerably more thought.

Domus Pool, Airelles Palladio Venice

Vincent Leroux

Airelles Palladio: excess with excellent manners

We arrive aboard the Calypso cruiser, through the Grand Canal and across to Giudecca, once known as Spinalonga for its elongated, fishbone-like shape. The crossing gives Venice back its outline. From here, domes and campanili compose themselves across the water, while the crowds become somebody else’s immediate concern.

Before arrival, Airelles had requested all three of our shoe sizes. The explanation materialises as three pairs of velvet slippers. Most hotels want to know when you are coming. This one has considered what you will be wearing when you stop moving.

The French group’s first Italian hotel has 45 rooms and suites, substantially fewer than its predecessor, amid lush gardens and a Guerlain spa. Its dining names include Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Nobu Matsuhisa, Norbert Niederkofler and Cédric Grolet. Reading the line-up feels rather like discovering that an unusually ambitious festival has also provided bedrooms. Next comes Elton’s Club, developed with Giudecca resident Sir Elton John, who has even selected the piano. As we checked out, his husband David Furnish arrived to celebrate his birthday. Evidently, our timing was impeccable in every respect except departure.

Yet the smaller details are equally persuasive. Beside the beds sit notepads with guests’ initials stamped in gold, their covers resembling beautiful bookbinding paper. The lighting is exceptional throughout, even inside the wardrobes, as are the signature scents. Someone has considered how things should look when you actually use them, after the photographer has gone home.

The entire floor-to-ceiling in-room bar is complimentary, from truffle crisps and a comprehensive tea selection to a full bottle of Roseblood rosé from Château d’Estoublon, co-owned by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Carla Bruni and Airelles proprietor Stéphane Courbit. Bruni even helped create the wine. Evidently, this is not your average minibar.

In the lush grounds, guests can meet Matrix, the handsome four-year-old hawk employed to discourage the gulls. There is also a 25-metre outdoor pool, its water at a decidedly forgiving 31°C during our stay. Even October can be made comfortable.

At breakfast, the accumulated wine research has left me operating below full capacity. The hotel supplies classy sunglasses. We are indoors. Airelles proves admirably equipped to manage the consequences of its own hospitality. Grolet’s pastries offer further encouragement to remain seated.

Villa Frollo Restaurant

PRESS HANDOUT

At Palladio Bar, Mattia Dipasquale points out that the neighbouring church remains consecrated: the Holy Spirit there, other spirits here. A concealed entrance later takes us from the bar to a candlelit concert in Santa Maria della Presentazione. Hotels often promise access. This one has a door.

Niederkofler’s Villa Frollo is my bet to become Venice’s next Michelin-starred restaurant. Masked waiters wear embroidered jackets; tall candelabra stand over bespoke Bernardaud plates. The menu unfolds into a Venetian skyline. What appear to be olives are unripe peaches preserved in vinegar.

The cooking earns its place in the production: properly pounded Garronese Veneta carpaccio, beautifully fine game ravioli paired, at the chef’s insistence, with Château d’Yquem 2020, its luscious sweetness playing against the savoury, saline intensity of the jus. Evidently, one of Bordeaux’s greatest sweet wines need not wait for pudding. A superbly nuanced combination of stracchino, lagoon honey and bee pollen follows. Sommelier Lara Moro speaks of balance and lightness as a philosophy of life as much as of wine, a welcome counterpoint to the operatic surroundings. Across the water, the illuminated Salute supplies the backdrop until lightning briefly takes charge of the lighting.

The warmth matters as much as the scenery. I am particularly pleased to encounter Clara Delage again, formerly of Four Seasons San Domenico Palace, Taormina, where she helped look after us the previous autumn. It was there that Lyra, taking the possibilities of five-star service seriously, dialled ‘0’ to request a room-service teddy bear. Familiarity travels well, even between rival hotel groups. For all the costumes, paintings and culinary celebrities, the pleasure is being welcomed by people whose company you enjoy.

Danieli, Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel

PRESS HANDOUT

Danieli: grandeur with a sense of humour

Across the water, the great staircase of Danieli, Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel, still makes an entrance in ordinary clothes feel faintly under-rehearsed. Pierre-Yves Rochon’s restoration has revived the Gothic splendour without making the place look newly purchased: gilded quatrefoils against blue in the lobby, pink marble, Murano glass and flowers of almost competitive extravagance. Above the soaring atrium, daylight enters through stained glass.

Our bedroom has light, a leather headboard and lagoon views from two aspects, as though one helping of Venice might prove insufficient. An ample dressing room allows the luggage to retire from public life. These are substantial comforts in a city where an atmospheric old building can sometimes be an elaborate explanation for why nothing quite fits.

The building’s capacity for excess apparently extends to its back rooms. In conversation with general manager Christian Zandonella and bar director Stefano Ruocco, I learn that even the laundry has canal views and balconies. I begin to wonder whether I have underestimated a career in housekeeping.

Danieli, Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel

PRESS HANDOUT

More reassuringly, the Four Seasons arrival has left room for personality. At breakfast, a veteran waiter jokes that he needs an elderly guest’s room number ‘for internal investigations’. My cappuccino arrives bearing an intricate image of St Mark’s Basilica in the foam. Sightseeing has become so efficient that I can drink a major landmark before leaving the table.

At Bar Dandolo, the aperitivo cicchetti are exceptional, given a level of care which makes the phrase ‘something to nibble’ sound inadequate. Bar director Stefano Ruocco makes me his T&Tonic, a fragrant reinvention of the gin and tonic, combining local gin with tea liqueur, elderflower and grapefruit. Drawing on his years abroad, it brings an international accent to Venetian ingredients. He gives Lyra’s spicy Virgin Mary equally serious consideration, then checks her verdict. She is a customer with preferences, which is a surprisingly difficult concept for some expensive hotels. Ruocco understands when to discuss a cocktail and when to leave someone alone with it.

Upstairs at Terrazza Danieli, the lagoon is gently tinted pink by the lampposts as San Giorgio Maggiore competes with dinner. Head sommelier Gianluca Lorusso once worked as a casino dealer; reading the table has proved a transferable skill. Sous-chef Michele Da Broi repeatedly comes to our table, finishing dishes and explaining them with evident pleasure. The scampi risotto, its shellfish lightly touched by the blowtorch, is excellent. A fig turns out to contain fig sorbet; a walnut shell conceals walnut sorbet. Even the fruit bowl is performing.

Blankets deal with the cooling terrace. The spa and swimming pool are still to come, a useful qualification for anyone imagining the transformation complete. For now, Danieli’s strongest restorative treatment is to sit down and let people who enjoy their work look after you.

JR, Il Gesto, The Venice Venice Hotel

PRESS HANDOUT

Venice Venice: an old palace misbehaving

Further along the Grand Canal, The Venice Venice Hotel takes a more provocative approach. Founders Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo made their fortune with Golden Goose’s deliberately distressed trainers. The distress at Ca’ da Mosto, rescued after decades of neglect, was considerably more authentic.

Their ‘Postvenetian’ philosophy gives the city permission to invent things again. Ancient arches, exposed brick and contemporary commissions coexist without anyone insisting that a Venetian hotel must look as though its decorator expired during the Republic. The effect is particularly welcome in a city where repetition has become such a profitable industry.

Art and sculpture command attention at every turn. A grand piano and drum kit stand a few metres from reception, suggesting that silence is not the only measure of luxury. Beyond our room, a 60-seat table adorned with grapes culminates in JR’s monumental tapestry, a contemporary reinterpretation of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, bringing another five centuries into the conversation. This is collecting with conviction, far removed from the hotelier’s customary pursuit of something sufficiently unobjectionable to hang above a sofa.

Our suite has an upstairs mezzanine with moon wallpaper and a cinema screen. After a day among Venetian palaces, one can retire to an unusually comfortable lunar outpost. The hotel has understood that contemporary comfort need not mean sanding every interesting surface into anonymity.

The Venice Venice

PRESS HANDOUT

At Francy’s, the Grand Canal is close enough to require a lifebuoy beside the condiments trolley. Matteo Omodei, who looks after us at dinner, tells me that guests have fallen in while taking selfies. The perfect angle can apparently involve an unscheduled swim.

Dining beside the canal means accepting its working traffic along with its beauty; as the evening progresses, the passing boats thin out and the water settles. Inside, black-and-white portraits depict suppliers. Across the water, the Rialto fish market offers such Venetian curiosities as gò, unprepossessing little lagoon gobies prized for risotto, and bisati, long, dark eels whose appearance does little to advertise their culinary virtues. This remains a hotel with a neighbourhood, however international its audience.

Illustrated menu cards arrive with recipes on the reverse, a brave gesture which gives diners both a picture against which to judge dinner and the means to attempt it at home. Sardines come with wonderfully succulent onions; gnocchi with Muscovy duck ragù are pillowy. The chocolate-and-vanilla mille-feuille resembles an intricately woven nest, with the crunch of brandy snaps and cocoa nibs. It is the pudding I would cross the city for.

General manager Simone Cherin tells me that he lives a few doors away and walks his daughter to her local school. After so much talk of Venice as a museum, a playground or a problem, it is cheering to hear about somebody’s school run.

Venissa

PRESS HANDOUT

Venissa: Venice remembers its countryside

For lunch and a change of scale, we take a boat north to Mazzorbo, linked by footbridge to Burano. At Venissa, the extravagance is space, vines, produce and birdsong. After several days of exquisite interiors, an allotment can feel almost radical.

Showing us around, Filippo Schiavon explains that reaching central Venice once meant five hours’ rowing; a speedboat now takes about twenty minutes. The old necessity of feeding an island informs a present ambition: to make the osteria and restaurant increasingly self-sufficient.

Within the estate, local residents tend plots and contribute the sort of agricultural knowledge that cannot be installed by an interior designer. Artichokes grow among the vines. For a moment, the landscape seems to belong to another century. An aircraft crossing overhead restores the calendar.

The Bisol family’s revival of the lagoon’s Dorona grape remains an extraordinary act of persistence. Growing wine in salt-threatened soil is an eccentric proposition; continuing after the vineyard was inundated in 2019 requires something stronger than an enthusiasm for provenance. On an earlier visit, the project had seemed quixotic, a Prosecco fortune underwriting an improbable Venetian dream. Returning makes its survival all the more affecting. The resulting wine comes in bottles bearing individual labels of Venetian gold leaf, applied by hand and fired onto the glass in Murano. Even the packaging is an exercise in preserving endangered craftsmanship. The wine has also found its way to Mayfair’s Hedonism Wines (£225).

Woodsmoke announces lunch at Osteria Contemporanea. A retractable roof, views of the vineyard, chequered flooring and a table of wooden planks provide an agreeable change from the choreography of grand hotel dining. The place smells of somebody making lunch.

Blue-crab spaghetti, with garlic, oil and chilli, comes with claws for further excavation. The shellfish sauce is deeply flavoured; a party of 36 elsewhere in the Osteria has not persuaded the kitchen to forget us. This is a lunch I remember for how much pleasure it delivered.

Venissa

Douglas Blyde

The three hotels where we stayed leave distinct impressions: Danieli’s grandeur and warmth, Venice Venice’s artistic nerve, Airelles’ prodigious attention to detail. Each has its own way of making you feel thoroughly spoilt.

Such exceptional hospitality is ruinous for the traveller. It resets expectations so comprehensively that other five-star addresses begin to resemble motorway hotels. You leave grateful, rested and burdened with an entirely unreasonable new definition of normal. The damage becomes apparent at the next check-in.

MORE ABOUT