How do you build a hotel in Venice? You don’t. You can’t. In this water-bound city without an inch of land to spare, the only way to build is to transform what already exists—a conversion involving unique challenges like transporting a marble table through an upstairs window from a crane mounted on a barge; restoring frescoes—hundreds of years old—buried under layers of paint; and conveying every chair, chandelier, and painting to the front door by boat.
A world-class hotel must be incised into one of the many centuries-old patrician palazzos along the canals. These buildings are made of handmade brick and Istrian stone and filled with frescoes and terrazzo floors, and they inevitably lack the modern amenities a hotel requires: air-conditioning and heat, up-to-date lighting, and many well-functioning bathrooms. These modern systems must be threaded invisibly through the historical structure, while the city’s expert artisans restore frescoes, silk-upholstered walls, and other original details.
The seemingly simpler task of furnishing the rooms proves to be just as complex. In Venice, this city of islands sitting on wooden piles driven into the lagoon bed, every bit of material arrives on small boats instead of trucks; all is unloaded and wheeled in on pushcarts, just as materials were for the aristocrats when they built these canal-side palaces. Modern convenience makes few inroads, and each renovation remains, in essence, a painstaking artisan project.
Creating stellar new hotels within the constraints imposed by Venice’s canals and tightly regulated historic buildings is a challenge playing out dramatically across the city as a new wave of luxury hotels takes shape. Yet, by and large, the results are spectacular—and the difficulties invisible when you walk into the newly opened Airelles Palladio, Venice, on the island of Giudecca, the Danieli Venezia near Piazza San Marco as it reopens under Four Seasons, or the Orient Express Venezia in a 15th-century palazzo in Cannaregio. I took the two-hour train from my home in Florence to see how modern luxury is taking shape in a city where building anything new still requires working within the old.
Behind the palatial Airelles Palladio, Venice
Airelles Palladio’s guest rooms are finished with brocade walls, antique furniture, and textiles by Venetian fabric maker Rubelli.
Photo by Vincent Leroux
Arrival at Airelles Palladio Venice, which opened in mid spring 2026, impresses from the very beginning. One of the hotel’s private wooden boats picks you up and whisks you across the water to Giudecca, the quieter residential island just across from Piazza San Marco. Disembark and the hotel’s staff appears in its made-to-measure livery of 18th-century-style brocade jackets and the occasional tricorn hat. “We like to recall the past with a bit of poetry,” commented Audrey di Fruscia, the hotel’s resident manager.
The hotel is cloistered within 2.5 acres of gardens, an improbable oasis of greenery among the narrow stone alleys of Venice, lined with white agapanthus blooms and large shade trees, with both indoor and outdoor swimming pools.
In Venice, every bit of material arrives on the small boats that replace trucks in this city of islands.
The main structure, the design of which is attributed to the seminal 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio, encompasses his Chiesa delle Zitelle, a church newly refurbished by Airelles. It originally opened as an institute to aid women without means, with a neighboring building providing their housing.
When the wooden hotel doors open, the liveried attendants usher you into a lobby beneath a monumental Murano chandelier, flanked by lounges where dark wood shelves of antique books rise above jacquard sofas. The impression created by architect Christophe Tollemer is of a palazzo as richly and meticulously appointed as the palazzos of the Venetian Republic once were.
The halls are lined with old busts and wooden pews, while the women’s convent-like rooms have been converted into accommodations with brocade walls, Canaletto-style paintings, refurbished antique furniture, and tapestries woven by Rubelli, one of Venice’s oldest fabric makers. Throughout the hotel are sunset-colored stained-glass doors crafted by Murano artisans. But modern amenities have been discreetly integrated into the historic building, from a Bluetooth system with speakers hidden in the coffered ceiling to lights that offer settings of full, medium, or “zen.”
Even seemingly straightforward decorative elements reveal the peculiar constraints of building in Venice. The hotel has three restaurants, from chefs Nobu Matsuhisa, Norbert Niederkofler, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. In Vongerichten’s dining room, heavy woodwork and mirrors had to be crafted onsite because they proved too difficult to transport by boat. With no basements and little storage space in Venice, suites were turned into makeshift art depots, crammed with paintings and objects before the works were arranged throughout the hotel.
When I walked into the third building, Villa Frollo, a former academy for young nobles, I saw what creating all this actually required. The villa was still being transformed into a nearly 5,000-square-foot, four-bedroom suite, just three days away from welcoming its first guests.
Yet all the tumult of a full construction site filled the frescoed rooms. Heaps of paintings covered the floors while chandeliers from Murano and Fortuny hung overhead, and everywhere workers were sawing and hammering, attaching candelabras to the walls, and carrying in pallets from a boat docked outside. A large marble table had been lifted into the villa through windows looking across the canal to Piazza San Marco by a crane mounted on a pontoon outside.
“It’s the Venetian way,” said Clara Delage, a marketing coordinator on the Airelles team. “It’s different, but it works.”
The scene was just a fraction of the four labor-intensive years of work behind the appearance of palatial perfection. Though the main structure had previously been a hotel, Airelles reduced the total rooms from 80 to 45, vastly enlarging and rearranging them in the process.
At the Danieli, artisans bring an icon back to life
The Danieli Venezia’s restoration includes three buildings dating from the 14th century to the 20th, with artisans restoring details including terrazzo and wood-inlay floors, glasswork, and gilded surfaces.
Photo courtesy of Danieli Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel
I crossed the Giudecca Canal to the Danieli Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel, just steps from Piazza San Marco, a month before its official reopening in late July 2026. Workers in hardhats were still everywhere. Some wheeled furniture in from the dock; others crouched on suspended scaffolding, delicately brushing on layers of gold leaf.
The main building, dating to the 1300s, was first converted into an upscale hotel in 1822. Now, as it readied for its grand reopening under Four Seasons, architect Pierre-Yves Rochon was overseeing a restoration and reimagining of the hotel, including its two additional buildings, dating to the 1800s and 1951. By the elevator bank, more restorers applied gold leaf to decorate the door frames, while portraits of the Dandolo family, the palazzo’s original owners and sometime Doges of Venice, hung on Rubelli brocade walls.
“The idea was to bring the Danieli into the 21st century while maintaining its sense of history,” said Bjorn Labee, sales manager of the hotel, as he pointed to the fresh work of artisans throughout the building: mirrors, woodwork, and glass, alongside Venetian terrazzo and wood-inlay flooring, all scrupulously restored. “These artisans maintain our bond with the city,” he said.
There was still work to be done, but the refreshed beauty of this Venetian landmark was already gleaming.
Uncovering centuries of history at the Orient Express Venezia
During the eight-year restoration of Palazzo Donà Giovannelli into Orient Express Venezia, artisans uncovered frescoes and original colors that had been concealed by centuries of alterations.
Photos courtesy of Orient Express Venezia
At the Orient Express Venezia, which opened in March 2026, the work was already finished. The hotel, set along a canal in the Cannaregio neighborhood, has revived the Palazzo Donà Giovannelli, an aristocratic residence dating to 1436. The building had been substantially renovated in the 19th century by Giovanni Battista Meduna, who also worked on the city’s Ca’ d’Oro palazzo and the original Teatro La Fenice opera house, and contained within it layers of history that had been painted over, partitioned, neglected, and obscured through successive renovations.
Paris-based architect Aline Asmar d’Amman, together with fleets of artisans, took eight years to restore and renew the palace’s historical splendor, including an octagonal staircase attributed to Meduna, frescoes by Francesco Hayez, a gilded ballroom from 1548, while introducing contemporary furnishings and concealing the modern functionality required of a hotel. Along the way, restorers uncovered numerous frescoes and original colors that had long been concealed, including the ballroom’s pastry pink walls.
“My architectural work is rooted in carrying heritage forward and a dialogue between the past and future,” d’Amman said.
Today, it’s difficult to imagine that the pink-and-white stone facade once lay buried behind layers of paint, and was brought back to life by restorers who scaled the sides, suspended above the canal waters to scrape away centuries of accretions.
It’s only when a small boat arrives at the hotel’s dock with the restaurant’s vegetable crates, and a row of boatmen passes them one by one from water to the land, that the work required to keep Venice running becomes visible.
Everything depends on boats, from grocery deliveries to the reconstruction of stately palazzos, all bound to a rhythm defined by water for centuries. It’s at once Venice’s greatest limitation and part of its enduring appeal: a way of life that feels almost impossible today, yet that we inhabit, at least briefly, on each visit to this lagoon city.
