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A pink palazzo seen from the Grand Canal behind its own garden fence, two palms and a wooden landing stage with mooring poles in front of it

Inspection · Venice, Italy

Palazzo Venart

Seventeen rooms in a restored private house in Santa Croce, with a lawn running down to its own gate on the Grand Canal and a two-star dining room that does breakfast. The address nobody walks past, which is most of the point.

Murano Room Virtuoso

Book Palazzo Venart with me, through Classic Travel Register first, free of charge, and the rates and partner benefits open up, with the account linked to Wheresnik. Tell me your dates before you book and I will say which room to ask for here, and which week I would avoid.

Virtuoso what it carries

  • Breakfast for two
  • A credit at the house
  • Upgrade when one is free
  • Early in, late out
What Virtuoso brings, in full →

The house turns its back on the street. From Calle Tron it is a brick wall, a wrought-iron gate and a brass plate, and you could pass it twice without registering that anything is behind it. Then the passage opens, the floor goes from paving to stone, and at the far end there is an arched glass wall with a garden behind it and, behind that, the Grand Canal.

A lawn and a stone path running down between two palms to a gate on the Grand Canal, Gothic palazzi on the far bank
From an upper window. The lawn, the path and the gate on the water all belong to the house, which in this city is the rare part.

Venice has grand hotels, and they are good at being grand. This one has seventeen rooms in a restored private house, and the thing it owns that they mostly do not is about forty metres of lawn with a gate at the end of it. Land on the Grand Canal usually carries a building to its edge. Here somebody left a garden, and the hotel is the beneficiary of a decision taken a long time before it existed.

Arriving

I walked in and I left by water, and the two are worth a paragraph because they are not the same building. On foot you get the calle, the plate, the passage and the glass door, which is a good sequence and a quiet one. By water the gate in the garden fence opens, the lawn is in front of you and the house stands pink above it, and you have understood the property before anybody says good afternoon. I had that in reverse and I would do it the other way round next time.

A brass plate reading Palazzo Venart on a brick wall beside a Leading Hotels of the World plate and a five-star albergo sign
The whole of the signage. Read the plates and you know the two things the house wants you to know.
A brick passage with a beamed ceiling and stone benches opening onto a glazed garden room
The passage from the calle, in the middle of the day. It works as a decompression chamber and I suspect that is deliberate.
A citrus tree in a carved stone trough against a pink wall with teak chairs and a low table in front of it
The side courtyard. Nobody was sitting in it at any hour I walked past, which is a recommendation.

The plate by the door carries The Leading Hotels of the World, which is the membership, and the building is the former Palazzo Bacchini delle Palme. The name Venart is made out of Venice and art, which is the sort of thing that reads better on a wall than in a sentence. The interiors earn it anyway.

The rooms you walk through

Seventeen keys means the public rooms are few and large, and for most of the hours I was in them they were empty.

A salon with red damask walls, a Murano chandelier, gilt mirrors and a deep pink carpet between tall curtained windows
The main salon. The carpet is the loudest thing in the house and the room can carry it.
A long room in red damask with a chandelier down its length, a bench along one wall and a lit window at the far end
The same room from the door. Venetian proportions: long, narrow, and lit from one short end.
A gold framed mirror and candelabra above a dark carved commode, with yellow velvet armchairs on a patterned carpet
Yellow velvet against silver damask, which should not work and does.

The decorative vocabulary is Venetian and it is laid on thickly: damask, gilt, Murano glass, marble terrazzo, painted overdoors. A house doing this badly ends up as a stage set. This one holds because the pieces are real and because the rooms are allowed to be dark. Nothing is uplit. In March the salons were lit by their own windows through the afternoon and by lamps once the light went, and those are two different rooms.

A brick passage lit at night, with cushioned stone benches, potted plants and a great arched glass door glowing at the far end
The same passage at eleven at night, coming back in. This is the photograph I would show somebody who asked what the hotel is like.
A room in silver and green damask with a Murano chandelier, a gilt bed with a tufted headboard and an olive velvet sofa
One of the larger rooms, shown to me empty. Seventeen schemes, and this is a different argument from mine.
Two blue pots of orchids on a round wooden table in a corridor with lanterns overhead
The landing. The orchids get changed and the table does not move.

The Murano Room

Here is the honest part. I had the Murano Room, which is a Classic Room with a terrace, twenty square metres of bedroom, for one night in the last week of March. That is a specific and limited thing to report on, and I will keep to it.

A bed with a red runner across white linen, a writing desk and chair beyond it against patterned wall silk
The room from the door. The desk is a real desk and the chair is a real chair, which at twenty square metres is a decision about priorities.
A desk with a brass lamp, a bottle of water, a welcome card and a leather folder on a dark top
On the desk when I came up: water, a card, and the leather folder every hotel has.
A bathroom in white Calacatta marble with a round basin, a walk-in bath and a rain shower over it
Calacatta on every wall. The shower is over the bath, which is the one thing in the room I would change.

The silk on the walls is an arabesque in silver and pale gold, and in daylight it carries the whole room. The bathroom is marble from the floor to the ceiling and it is the better of the two spaces. The bath has the shower over it. I do not mind that and plenty of people do, so I have put it in the questions below as well, because finding out at eleven at night is the wrong time.

A tube of Etro bath product and a small bottle on a glass tray beside a wrapped soap on marble
Etro Palais Jamais, which smells of the nineteen-eighties in the way the brand intends.
A wooden crate of six oranges with a printed card beside a bottle of water and two glasses
A crate of oranges, with a card. Fruit in a room is usually three grapes under cling film.
A painted chaise longue on hexagonal terracotta tiles behind an iron railing, the tiled roofs of Venice beyond
Out through the glass doors. Hexagonal tiles, which in Venice is a small joke about the pavement.

The terrace, which is the reason

Twenty square metres indoors and a terrace outdoors is the trade this room asks you to make, and in late March it was the right one by a distance.

Two long painted chairs with deep cushions on a tiled terrace, a brick campanile rising behind a trellis
Late afternoon on the terrace. The campanile does the work that a canal view would do and it is quieter.
A stone path between lawns running towards a gate, with Gothic palazzi in red and white on the far side of the canal
Downstairs, standing on the lawn looking out through the gate. Every guest gets this one, whichever room the key opens.
A wrought-iron double gate throwing a lace of shadow across a stone floor
Mid-morning at the land gate. For about an hour the ironwork is printed on the floor and then it is gone.

Nobody can see in. There is a trellis on one side, a brick wall on another, and above the parapet the roofs of Santa Croce run away towards the campanile. That is an evening you cannot have in a room on the water, because a canal view comes with a canal, and the canal comes with everybody on it from seven in the morning.

Breakfast

A dining room with laid tables in cream linen, framed prints on a brick wall, service trolleys in the corner and a plate of fruit in the foreground
Breakfast in the GLAM room. The trolleys stay where they stand at night and the room is a third as loud.

The dining room is GLAM, which carries two Michelin stars under Enrico Bartolini with Donato Ascani running the kitchen, and in the morning it is the hotel breakfast room. I think this is the single best thing about staying here, and it costs nothing extra, since breakfast for two comes with the rate I book.

It is a la carte. Eggs on a green plate, a basket of pastry, a bowl of fruit cut properly, coloured Murano glasses on the linen. The glass wall gives on to the courtyard and the magnolia. What makes it is the room: brick vaulting, framed prints up the wall, the service trolleys parked in their corner, the tables already laid for a lunch you will not be there for. Eating breakfast inside a two-star dining room with the lights half up is a quiet pleasure, and it is the thing I remember best from the stay.

I did not eat dinner there, because I had one night and I spent the evening out, which is the reason this section stops where it does. The kitchen cooks the lagoon, the vegetables come off the Venetian islands and the fish off the Rialto market, and that is as far as I can take you on somebody else's authority.

One correction to all of the above, and it matters if you are going now. The room has been redone since I sat in it. GLAM has moved into the space below, under dark beams, with a sepia jungle painted the whole length of one wall and glass globes hanging in front of it. Breakfast is served there too. So read my description as the room I had, and look at the photograph for the room you will walk into.

A dining room with laid tables in white linen, a tall window wall onto a courtyard along the left and a wall painted in sepia with palms, a leopard, a tiger and a lion, glass sconces down the right
The new GLAM room, which is also where breakfast is now served. The wall is painted the whole way along, and the room I ate in is the one above.

What I would tell you before you book

Book the room and not the category. Seventeen rooms with seventeen schemes means the generic description is doing very little work, and the difference between two rooms at the same price here is larger than the difference between two categories at most hotels. Say what you want from the window, say how much floor you need, and I will name a number.

Decide between the terrace and the canal early, because they are different rooms and you cannot have the argument at check-in. The terrace is private, quiet and yours in the evening. The canal is the view everyone pictures when they think of Venice and it comes with traffic.

Arrive by water once. Walk the rest.

And if GLAM is part of the reason you are going, book the table when you book the room. The restaurant runs Wednesday to Sunday and it fills, and a room upstairs holds nothing downstairs.

One night, one breakfast, in March, in the smallest room with a terrace. I know what the house is and I do not know how it wears over a week. That is the honest size of this page, and it will grow when I go back.

The varnished deck of a water taxi with an Italian flag at the stern, Ca' Pesaro on the far bank of the Grand Canal
Leaving. Ca' Pesaro is two minutes up the water from the hotel's own gate, which tells you where you have been staying.

Where it is

Santa Croce 1961, Calle Tron, on the Grand Canal between the Rialto and Ca' Pesaro. About ten minutes on foot to the Rialto, a few more to Piazzale Roma, and the San Stae stop is along the water. Booked through Classic Travel, where the house sits under Virtuoso. That rate carries breakfast for two served in the restaurant, a food and beverage credit to spend during the stay, an upgrade on arrival when the house can do it, early arrival and late departure subject to the day, and wifi. The credit is for food and drink, it does not come off the room rate, it does not combine with other offers, and anything left on it at checkout is gone, so plan it into a lunch or a dinner and use it. Bookings in suites also carry a return boat to a Murano glass factory, which the Murano Room does not, whatever the name suggests. Send me your dates and the room you have your eye on and I will put the whole thing in front of you with the number attached.

Before you book

The questions people send me about Palazzo Venart.

Where exactly is it, and how long is the walk to Rialto and San Marco?
Santa Croce 1961, on Calle Tron, with the garden front on the Grand Canal between the Rialto and Ca' Pesaro. Rialto is about ten minutes on foot through Santa Croce and San Polo, and San Marco is roughly twenty-five. Piazzale Roma, where the buses and the taxis stop, is a short walk the other way, which matters if you are arriving with luggage and no boat. The San Stae vaporetto stop is a few minutes along the canal.
Can I arrive by boat, and should I?
Yes, and yes. The hotel has a private landing stage on the Grand Canal with a gate straight into the garden, so a water taxi from Marco Polo or from the station can put you on the lawn in front of the house. I came in on foot and went out by water, and the view of the pink front with its two palms as the boat pulls off is the one I would have wanted on the way in. Say so when you book and I will have the hotel arrange the boat to meet you.
What is the Murano Room, and is twenty square metres enough?
It is a Classic Room with a terrace, and twenty square metres is the floor area of the bedroom. Silk wall coverings in an arabesque pattern, Calacatta marble in the bathroom with a bath and the shower over it, a desk under the window, Etro toiletries, an espresso machine. The terrace is the reason to take it: hexagonal tiles, two long painted chairs, and the roofs of Santa Croce with a brick campanile closing the view. It is enough for two people who treat the room as somewhere to sleep and dress. It is tight for two people who want to work in it all afternoon, and it has a bath with the shower over it, so if a separate walk-in shower matters to you, say so and I will put you in another room.
Does the Murano Room come with the boat to Murano?
No, and the names make that an easy mistake to walk into. The Virtuoso rate at this house includes a complimentary return boat transfer to a Murano glass factory for bookings in suites. The Murano Room is a Classic Room with a terrace and takes the room-level benefits, which are breakfast for two, a food and beverage credit, an upgrade on arrival when the house can do it, and early arrival or late departure subject to the day. If the glass factory is something you want, book a suite and I will have it confirmed in writing before you travel.
Is breakfast really served in GLAM, and did you eat dinner there?
Breakfast is served in the GLAM room, a la carte, and the courtyard with the old magnolia is through the glass beside you. I had one breakfast there and no dinner, so I can tell you what the room is like in the morning and nothing at all about the tasting menus. GLAM publishes lunch and dinner Wednesday to Sunday, and it books separately from the hotel. A room here does not hold a table, so if the restaurant is part of the plan, give me your dates early and I will ask for both at once.
What about a room on the Grand Canal?
Those exist and they are a separate decision. The hotel designates certain rooms and suites as Grand Canal rooms, and a terrace room is a different thing with a different outlook. Rooms here are not steps on one ladder, so a larger suite, a canal view and a private terrace are three answers to three different questions. Tell me which of the three you actually care about and I will match it, because paying up the list does not automatically get you the one you wanted.

Something else you want to know? Write to me and I will answer it here.

Two croissants on a pale green plate beside a jar of yoghurt and a small plate of chocolates with a raspberry A breakfast table from above: poached eggs on spinach on a green plate, smoked salmon, toast and coloured Murano glasses Two blue glazed pots of pale orchids on a round table in a panelled corridor An old magnolia in a walled courtyard seen from above, with restaurant tables and chairs stacked on the paving below A salon in red damask in the evening, a gilt mirror over a mirrored table with candlesticks and a painted overdoor The old GLAM dining room, tables in cream linen under a beamed ceiling, painted credenzas along the end wall and framed prints down the right

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