Best hotels in Venice, Italy | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and these are my recommendations for the best boutique and luxury hotels in Venice, Italy.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered each hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for each hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Venice, Italy

The palaces along the Grand Canal were never built to be hotels. That essential truth shapes everything about staying in Venice — the creaking piano nobile, the frescoed ceilings too tall for a single chandelier to fill, the particular melancholy of water heard but rarely seen from your bed. San Marco and its adjacencies concentrate the most historically freighted addresses: the Gritti Palace, whose 15th-century patrician facade has been restored with a seriousness that puts most period renovations to shame, and the Baglioni Hotel Luna, which claims to be Venice's oldest hotel, housed in a building with documented connections to the Knights Templar. The St. Regis occupies the former palazzo of a Venetian noble family on the Grand Canal, while Nolinski Venezia — a more recent arrival from the French Evok Hotels group — brings a cooler, more Continental editorial eye to San Marco, its interiors threading Venetian craft traditions through a contemporary sensibility that feels neither reverential nor dismissive of its surroundings. Dorsoduro rewards those willing to trade Grand Canal pageantry for a different quality of light and quiet. The Sina Centurion Palace sits on the Punta della Dogana end of the sestiere, where the canal widens toward the lagoon and the vaporetto traffic thins. Ca Maria Adele, also in Dorsoduro, works in a more intimate register — five themed rooms with a theatricality that borders on maximalist, clearly aimed at travelers who want Venice to perform for them. Across the water on Giudecca, the Cipriani has operated since 1958 with a degree of studied remove from the city proper; its Olympic-length pool and garden remain genuinely rare amenities, and the boat crossing feels less like an inconvenience than a daily ceremony. The San Clemente Palace Kempinski goes further still, occupying its own island entirely — a former monastery — which is either monastic calm or enforced isolation depending on your temperament. Ca'di Dio, near the Arsenale in Castello, represents one of the more considered recent interventions: Patricia Urquiola redesigned the 13th-century pilgrims' hospice with her characteristic material intelligence, layering local craft references against a confident modernism without collapsing into nostalgia. It remains among the most architecturally coherent hotels in the city. At the other end of the spectrum, Il Palazzo Experimental in Dorsoduro pitches itself as a younger, less ceremony-bound address — the Experimental Group's characteristic low-key affect transplanted into a Venetian palazzo, and largely succeeding on its own terms.

Book with PB and get cash back

Ca'di Dio

Venice, Italy • Arsenale • SPLURGE

avg. $565 / night

Includes $30 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Hilton Honors™ property

Ca'di Dio Design Editorial

Facing the Venetian lagoon along the Riva dei Sette Martiri, a fifteenth-century pilgrim hospice built to shelter crusaders departing for the Holy Land now serves as Ca' di Dio, a hotel whose layered history carries more weight than almost any comparable property in the city. The building, whose stepped Istrian stone cornice is visible from the water, was sensitively converted by Patricia Urquiola — one of the few designers with both the confidence and the restraint to work against Venice's tendency toward Gothic excess. Her 65-room scheme, completed in 2021, treats the palazzo as a collaborator rather than a backdrop. The interiors move between two registers: a warm midcentury Italian sensibility in the guestrooms, where terrazzo floors, teal chenille sofas, burgundy velvet ottomans, and textured green wallcovering suggest a Venetian apartment assembled over decades rather than designed in a single pass, and a more polished public atmosphere in the bar, where fluted black Nero Marquina marble wraps the counter beneath walnut paneling and brass-trimmed shelving. Convex mirrors and amber Murano glass wall sconces carry the craft tradition of the city without resorting to pastiche. From the waterfront terrace — the building's single greatest asset — the campanile of San Marco sits directly in the sightline across the basin, the kind of view that no amount of interior design can manufacture and that Urquiola, to her credit, left entirely unframed.

Book with PB and get cash back

Hotel L'Orologio Venice

Venice, Italy • San Polo • OVER THE TOP

avg. $667 / night

Includes $35 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Hotel L'Orologio Venice Design Editorial

Directly beside the Rialto fish market, where the fondamenta runs along the Grand Canal with the Gothic arches of the Pescaria visible just steps away, a cluster of medieval Venetian buildings was converted into Hotel L'Orologio Venice — a property whose most disciplined achievement is resisting the temptation to compete with its surroundings. The WTB Hotels group brought in a restrained contemporary hand for the interiors, threading mid-century Italian furniture through rooms whose original exposed timber ceiling beams were whitewashed and left structurally exposed rather than concealed behind plasterwork. The Canal Grande rooms frame direct sightlines across the water to the palazzi opposite, terracotta-toned wainscoting anchoring a palette of black lacquered desks, leather chairs, and linen curtains that moves closer to a Milanese residential register than the gilded Venetian baroque most competitors default to. The bar works a different mood entirely — dark polished stone countertops, backlit brass-tinted shelving, worn original beams overhead stained deep brown, and resin-sealed terracotta floors that absorb the low lighting into something more reminiscent of a serious cocktail room in Rome's Prati neighbourhood than a hotel bar in Venice. Outside, the canalside terrace set with Moroccan lanterns and black iron bistro furniture runs right to the water's edge, the Pescaria's brick arches glowing amber at dusk behind it. For a city where historical atmosphere is frequently performed rather than inhabited, the property manages something genuinely useful: a contemporary interior that lets the building, and the canal, do the talking.

Book with PB and get cash back

Nolinski Venezia

Venice, Italy • San Marco • OVER THE TOP

avg. $670 / night

Includes $35 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Nolinski Venezia Design Editorial

Bringing a Parisian hospitality sensibility into the fabric of a sixteenth-century Venetian palazzo was always going to require a particular kind of nerve. The Evok Group managed it with Nolinski Venezia, which opened in 2019 within a historic building near Campo San Luca, its terracotta-washed facade, white Istrian stone detailing, and arched windows — visible in the image — placing it squarely within the Serenissima's architectural grammar. French interior designer Jean-Michel Wilmotte, whose studio has worked across cultural institutions and hospitality projects throughout Europe, handled the interiors across the hotel's 32 rooms and suites, navigating between Venetian decorative tradition and a spare Parisian modernism that Evok's other properties, including the original Nolinski in Paris, have made their signature. The tension between those two sensibilities runs through every space. Guestrooms are divided between two distinct registers: some lined in large-format veined marble with black steel-framed glazed partitions and blush linen benches, others warmer in tone with herringbone parquet, crimson lacquered armchairs, pink velvet sofas, and arched timber windows dressed in floor-length drapes. The bar, the property's most atmospheric room, is upholstered entirely in deep garnet velvet, its ceiling covered in a figurative fresco referencing the winged lion of Saint Mark, its shelves floor-to-ceiling with books and backlit spirits. Above it all, the rooftop spa pool is finished in gold mosaic tile, its low clerestory windows framing the city's domes and campanili like a sequence of painted panels.

Book with PB and get cash back

Palazzo Venart Luxury Hotel

Venice, Italy • San Polo • OVER THE TOP

avg. $740 / night

Includes $39 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

LHW Leaders Club property

Palazzo Venart Luxury Hotel Design Editorial

One of the last privately owned palazzi on the Grand Canal, the fifteenth-century Venetian Gothic structure that houses Palazzo Venart Luxury Hotel was restored and opened as an eighteen-room hotel in 2016, its most remarkable asset being something almost no Venice hotel can claim: a sprawling private garden running down to the canal, thick with magnolias, palms, and classical statuary now companionably interrupted by contemporary sculptures in painted steel ribbon and cast bronze. The interiors navigate the familiar Venetian tension between palazzo grandeur and habitable warmth with some confidence. Guest rooms divide between two registers — the more formal piano nobile suites dressed in crimson velvet headboards with gilded Baroque cartouches, damask wallcoverings, Murano glass chandeliers, and terrazzo alla veneziana floors, and the rusticated upper rooms where exposed chestnut beams, raw brick, and walnut-brown plaster walls carry a warmer, almost agricultural intimacy. The contrast is deliberate and works well. The restaurant, Glam — which under chef Enrico Bartolini has held two Michelin stars — takes an entirely different tone, its dining room fitted with darkened oak flooring, black steel-framed glazing opening onto a cortile, and floor-to-ceiling grisaille tropical murals that give the space the feeling of a theatrical interlude between the palazzo's more earnest historic rooms. The evening courtyard, lit by low bollard lamps against the rose-plastered facade, offers perhaps the most persuasive argument for the property's particular version of Venetian hospitality.

Book with PB and get cash back

Violino d'Oro

Venice, Italy • San Marco • OVER THE TOP

avg. $889 / night

Includes $47 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

LHW Leaders Club property

Violino d'Oro Design Editorial

Calle Barozzi, a narrow lane threading between the Grand Canal and Campo Santo Stefano in the San Marco sestiere, has the kind of address that Venetian hotels spend centuries trying to acquire. Violino d'Oro sits in a four-storey palazzo along this corridor, its cream stucco facade framed by deep green shutters and terracotta roof tiles — a building whose proportions and arched ground-floor loggia place it squarely in the palazzetto tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stone steps descend directly to a private canal mooring, and gondolas pass close enough to the entrance that arriving by water carries an almost theatrical charge. The interiors carry the atmosphere of a Venetian patrician residence assembled over generations rather than designed in a single gesture. Murano glass chandeliers hang in every room — blown in the extravagant branching style the city has produced since the Renaissance — while brass four-poster beds sit on dark-stained hardwood floors laid with Greek-key bordered rugs in deep green or warm stone. Scenic chinoiserie wallpapers, displayed as full panels behind the beds, reference Venice's historic role as conduit between European and Eastern luxury trade. The salon deploys a black marble fireplace beneath a large-format chinoiserie painting, crimson velvet sofas arranged beside cane-back armchairs in a combination that suggests the layered collecting habits of an eighteenth-century Grand Tour interior rather than any contemporary hospitality formula.

Book with PB and get cash back

Baglioni Hotel Luna

Venice, Italy • San Marco • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,174 / night

Includes $62 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

LHW Leaders Club property

Baglioni Hotel Luna Design Editorial

Among the oldest hotels in Venice — and by some accounts in the world — the building that houses Baglioni Hotel Luna has served travellers since the twelfth century, when it functioned as a lodge for Knights Templar departing for the Crusades. That foundation gives the property on Calle Vallaresso, a short walk from Piazza San Marco and directly facing the Bacino, a weight of continuous habitation that no amount of contemporary repositioning could manufacture. The pale ochre facade, five storeys of Venetian neoclassical restraint with white-trimmed balustrades and shuttered windows, gives little away from the water. Inside, the interiors deploy the full vocabulary of Venetian decorative tradition without apology: Murano glass chandeliers with scrolled amber arms hang above herringbone parquet in rooms dressed in damask wallcovering — one scheme in dove blue with gilded Baroque headboards, another in champagne and plum with Louis XV-style marquetry writing desks. The bar, refurbished with a burnished bronze oval counter set against faux-marbled panels in amber and grey, a Murano crystal chandelier overhead and an eighteenth-century painting anchoring the back wall, handles the tension between period atmosphere and contemporary use with more composure than most Venetian interiors manage. Upper-floor rooms frame direct views across the lagoon to San Giorgio Maggiore — Palladio's white campanile visible through silk-draped windows, framed like a painting the hotel has always known was there.

Book with PB and get cash back

The St. Regis Venice

Venice, Italy • San Marco • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,330 / night

Includes $70 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Marriott Bonvoy® property

The St. Regis Venice Design Editorial

Sitting directly on the Grand Canal at the foot of the Salute, where the mouth of the canal opens toward the Giudecca, the building that houses the St. Regis Venice carries one of the most contested views in European architecture — Longhena's Santa Maria della Salute framed from the waterline, visible from the terrace restaurant at dusk in a way that makes the baroque dome feel almost impossibly close. The hotel, which was extensively renovated before its 2019 opening under Marriott's St. Regis flag, was shaped by interior designer Matteo Thun, whose approach here trades the overwrought neo-Venetian grandeur that weighs down many properties in the city for something more confidently contemporary. The 169 rooms and suites move between two distinct registers: some, finished in herringbone oak with veined marble fireplaces and velvet armchairs in forest green, lean toward a relaxed mid-century residential warmth, while others shift the palette toward blush and slate blue, with upholstered headboards and silk-trimmed curtains drawing more from a quietly modern sensibility. The Thun Bar anchors the ground floor with a terrazzo floor, a burnished gold-leaf ceiling, and a curved bar counter faced in textured plasterwork — its crimson leather stools and sage-green lounge chairs arranged with the studied ease of a room that has been lived in, rather than installed. The wrought-iron entrance canopy visible from the calle outside signals arrival without theatre.

Book with PB and get cash back

Cipriani, A Belmond Hotel

Venice, Italy • Giudecca Island • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,464 / night

Includes $77 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Cipriani, A Belmond Hotel Design Editorial

Positioned on the Giudecca's northern edge with the entire Venetian skyline — San Giorgio Maggiore, the Campanile, the Doge's Palace — arrayed across the water like a painted backdrop, the Cipriani has held one of the great site advantages in European hospitality since Giuseppe Cipriani opened it in 1958. The property was conceived not as a palazzo conversion but as a purpose-built garden hotel, low-slung and terracotta-washed, its four floors stepping back from the lagoon in a manner that keeps the views generous from almost every angle. The Olympic-length pool, visible in the aerial image with white-canopied loungers ranged along its edge, remains one of the very few in Venice proper — a civilised impossibility in a city where flat ground is itself a luxury. Inside, the 96 rooms and suites draw on the full vocabulary of the Venetian decorative tradition without surrendering to pastiche. Lacquered bedheads in the Settecento manner sit against damask wallpapers in warm cream and gold; herringbone parquet floors anchor rooms furnished with painted Venetian case pieces and Persian rugs; blown-glass Murano chandeliers cast the kind of diffuse amber light that makes everything look like a Tiepolo. The lagoon-facing terrace restaurant, lit at dusk by iron lanterns and set with mosaic-topped tables directly above the water's edge, distils the property's essential proposition: that the most persuasive argument for staying on the Giudecca is the view back toward a city you are relieved, briefly, not to be inside.

Book with PB and get cash back

Hotel Gritti Palace

Venice, Italy • San Marco • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,665 / night

Includes $88 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Marriott Bonvoy® property

Hotel Gritti Palace Design Editorial

Built in 1525 as the private residence of Andrea Gritti, Doge of Venice, the Gothic-Renaissance palazzo on the Grand Canal has carried the weight of Venetian power ever since — Somerset Maugham drank here, Hemingway wrote here, and the Hotel Gritti Palace has held its place among Europe's most historically saturated addresses across five centuries of continuous occupation. The building's terracotta brick facade, with its distinctive pointed Gothic arches rising across four floors, faces directly onto the canal with the kind of unmediated waterfront presence that no amount of contemporary hotel engineering can manufacture from scratch. A 2013 restoration overseen by the Wtc Design Group returned 82 rooms and suites to a condition that honors the palazzo's accumulated decorative history rather than rationalizing it away. Each room follows its own logic: one suite unfolds in blush stucco with gilded cartouches, a Louis XV bed frame upholstered in floral fabric, and a foxed Venetian mirror catching canal light through full-height French doors; another works a cooler palette of slate-blue velvet, tufted headboard with nailhead trim, and an antique kilim anchoring the parquet floor beneath a Murano glass chandelier. The bar, lined in verde antico marble panels and etched antique mirror, its terrazzo floor inlaid with mosaic medallions, carries the atmosphere of a patrician salon that has absorbed decades of very good conversation. The floating terrace — teak-decked, banked with pink geraniums — extends the palazzo directly onto the water.

Book with PB and get cash back

Aman Venice

Venice, Italy • San Polo • OVER THE TOP

avg. $2,532 / night

Includes $133 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Aman Venice Design Editorial

Palazzo Papadopoli has stood on the Grand Canal since the 1560s, commissioned by the Coccina family and attributed to Gian Giacomo dei Grigi, its white Istrian stone facade one of the more composed Renaissance statements along a waterway better known for Gothic ornament. When Aman converted it into a 24-room hotel in 2013, the challenge was not transformation but calibration — how much contemporary furniture a frescoed ceiling of this age can absorb before the room tips into pastiche. Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston Architects resolved it with restraint: parquet floors in chevron and herringbone patterns, beds and case pieces in warm walnut and pale upholstery, Murano glass chandeliers that belong to the building's own tradition rather than being brought in as decoration. The damask wall coverings visible in the guest rooms draw from the Venetian textile lineage without attempting reproduction. The piano nobile entertaining rooms, where gilded plasterwork and swaged silk pelmets frame floor-to-ceiling windows opening directly onto the Canal, set the dining experience against one of the more arresting waterfront views in Europe. A loggia terrace above, dressed with wicker chairs and terracotta planters threaded with climbing vines, offers the same view in a more informal register. The property extends across two connected palazzi, giving it a rare sense of internal depth for Venice — a garden courtyard behind the facade providing the kind of quiet that the city, at water level, almost never grants.

Book with PB and get cash back

Il Palazzo Experimental

Venice, Italy • Dorsoduro • OPTIMIZE

avg. $258 / night

Includes $14 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Il Palazzo Experimental Design Editorial

Two Gothic-revival palazzi facing the Zattere waterfront in Dorsoduro — the former headquarters of the Adriatica di Navigazione shipping company, their pointed Venetian arches and terracotta brick facades still carrying the company's gilded signage — were converted in 2019 into Il Palazzo Experimental, the Parisian hospitality group's first Italian venture. The interior transformation was handed to Dorothée Meilichzon, Experimental Group's in-house creative director, whose approach here is more confident and more architecturally conversational than almost anything she had produced previously. The Gothic window tracery becomes a recurring compositional motif inside: Meilichzon echoes the building's ogee arches in custom headboards upholstered in navy velvet and pale grey ribbed fabric, in arched mirror frames outlined in aubergine-lacquered steel in the bar, and in the tall plaster surrounds of the restaurant's full-height windows. That dining room, with its Calacatta marble pedestal tables, dark walnut banquette dividers, forest-green half-wall panelling, and Venetian terrazzo floor, draws the Adriatic light inward without competing with the canal views directly beyond. Bedrooms alternate between terracotta-pink Venetian plaster with burnt-sienna wainscoting and cooler mineral grey, each furnished with a low rounded armchair in salmon velvet that carries a faint echo of Carlo Mollino. The cocktail bar compresses everything into a single jewellery-box room: plum walls, brass pendant rings, a curved black granite counter, and Murano-glass mirror detailing that acknowledges exactly where you are without resorting to pastiche.

Book with PB and get cash back

Hotel Indigo Venice - Sant'Elena, an IHG Hotel - Image 1

Hotel Indigo Venice - Sant'Elena, an IHG Hotel - Image 2

Hotel Indigo Venice - Sant'Elena, an IHG Hotel - Image 3

Hotel Indigo Venice - Sant'Elena, an IHG Hotel

Venice, Italy • Sant'Elena • SPLURGE

avg. $289 / night

Includes $15 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

IHG® One Rewards property

Hotel Indigo Venice - Sant'Elena, an IHG Hotel Design Editorial

Sant'Elena is the quietest of Venice's sestieri — a residential island tip added to the city's eastern edge only in the early twentieth century, more garden suburb than tourist circuit, where locals walk dogs along tree-lined avenues and the Biennale crowds rarely penetrate. It is here that Hotel Indigo Venice Sant'Elena is set within a rationalist-inflected brick building from the 1920s, its arched entrance portal and corbelled cornice visible in the images alongside mature palms and a generous private garden — a combination almost impossible to find anywhere else in the lagoon city. The interiors work a warm, considered palette of tobacco-brown leather headboards, grisaille botanical wallpaper panels framed in dark timber, dusty rose and ochre cushions, and faded kilim-style rugs across dark hardwood floors — an atmosphere closer to a well-travelled private apartment than a managed hotel room. The bar and restaurant space layers patterned encaustic tilework, exposed pale brick, dark-panelled wainscoting, and a curved fluted bar counter beneath a mix of Murano-inflected glass pendants and mid-century industrial shades, the decorative plates mounted salon-style along the walls giving the room a distinctly Venetian domestic register. A glazed garden pavilion extends the dining offer into the hotel's rare outdoor space, with circular porthole apertures in the surrounding white-rendered wing framing views of palms and lawn — a pocket of stillness that most of Venice cannot offer.

Book with PB and get cash back

Corte di Gabriela

Venice, Italy • San Marco • SPLURGE

avg. $312 / night

Includes $16 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Corte di Gabriela Design Editorial

Behind an unmarked brick facade on Calle degli Avvocati, number 3836, a fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo has been converted into Corte di Gabriela with an approach that refuses to choose between the building's history and a contemporary sensibility. The entrance — a stone-framed doorway barely wider than a single person, opening onto a corridor that leads into a sequence of progressively grander rooms — sets up a spatial drama that the palazzo's original builders understood instinctively. What the images reveal is a property that lets its structural inheritance do the heavy lifting. The lobby and bar area preserve original terrazzo floors inlaid with compass-point medallions, coffered timber ceilings painted in deep lacquer, and pairs of veined marble columns that no contemporary budget could convincingly replicate. Against this, the furnishings introduce mid-century Italian references — a grand piano, olive-green velvet armchairs on splayed legs, a Murano glass disc sculpture — without staging a period-room pastiche. Guest rooms shift register depending on their position within the building: upper-floor suites expose rough brick walls backlit behind the headboard and retain exposed timber beams above terrazzo floors, while standard rooms layer aubergine wall paint and taupe curtaining over parquet in a palette closer to contemporary Milan than historic Venice. The whole property runs to around ten rooms, which keeps the scale intimate enough that the building's character remains legible rather than diluted.

Book with PB and get cash back

San Clemente Palace Kempinski

Venice, Italy • San Clemente • OVER THE TOP

avg. $694 / night

Includes $37 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

San Clemente Palace Kempinski Design Editorial

Floating free of Venice's crowds on its own private island in the southern lagoon, the complex that became San Clemente Palace Kempinski carries more than nine centuries of accumulated history — a twelfth-century church, a sequence of monastic cloisters, and later additions that served variously as a hospice and a psychiatric institution before the entire island was converted into a hotel in 2003. The pink-rendered palazzo visible from the water, with its Venetian Gothic detailing and stone quayside, frames an arrival by private launch that no mainland property can replicate — San Clemente sits roughly fifteen minutes from Piazza San Marco, close enough to see the campanile through the arched windows yet far enough to feel genuinely removed from the city. Inside, the 190 rooms and suites move between two registers. The grander lagoon-facing rooms carry original dark timber beam ceilings, terracotta pavimento floors, and four-poster beds upholstered in cartographic brocade, with Murano glass chandeliers casting amber light across cream-painted walls — San Giorgio Maggiore visible through arched wooden-framed windows in the finest suites. The bar and lounge areas work a more polished, Art Deco-inflected language: floor-to-ceiling gridded mirror panels, crushed-velvet barrel chairs in taupe and silver, ironwork gate details, and patterned wool carpet in amber and charcoal. Outside, a large oval pool set within the island's three hectares of gardens provides something genuinely rare in Venice — the sensation of a resort, with white canopied daybeds arranged against a backdrop of cypress and plane trees.

Book with PB and get cash back

Palazzina Grassi

Venice, Italy • San Marco • OVER THE TOP

avg. $701 / night

Includes $37 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Palazzina Grassi Design Editorial

Philippe Starck's intervention in a centuries-old Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal is, by its very nature, a provocation — and at Palazzina Grassi, that tension between the building's patrician bones and its designer's instinct for theatrical reinvention is exactly the point. The fifteenth-century structure, its white Istrian stone arcade stepping directly from the water between the Rialto and the Accademia, received Starck's treatment when the property was relaunched in 2012 under the Benetton family's ownership. Just 26 rooms and suites were carved from the palazzo's upper floors, keeping the guest count intimate enough that the building never feels overwhelmed by the hospitality program layered inside it. The interior scheme moves between Venetian tradition and Starck's characteristic futurism without apology. Bedrooms deploy floor-to-ceiling Murano-glass mirrors etched with botanical motifs — a direct nod to the city's craft heritage — alongside polished chrome Louis Ghost chairs and draped grey linen, the palette running to oyster, silver, and soft taupe. Grand Canal suites frame those famous arched windows with floor-length curtains in heavy silk, the waterway visible below in every direction. The bar, by contrast, leans darker and more hedonistic: warm walnut panelling, copper-shaded industrial pendants over a green marble counter, and Carrara columns left from the original structure standing alongside monochrome encaustic floor tiles. A rear garden terrace shaded by Japanese maples offers one of the few genuinely quiet outdoor dining spaces left in San Marco.

Book with PB and get cash back

Sina Centurion Palace

Venice, Italy • Dorsoduro • OVER THE TOP

avg. $707 / night

Includes $37 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Hilton Honors™ property

Sina Centurion Palace Design Editorial

Right where the Grand Canal widens toward the Santa Maria della Salute — Longhena's great baroque dome visible from every canal-facing window — a fifteenth-century Gothic palazzo that once served as the Venetian headquarters of the Austro-Hungarian Customs Authority now carries the Sina Centurion Palace. The building's facade, four storeys of warm Venetian brick articulated by white Istrian stone tracery in the pointed-arch Gothic manner, presents one of the canal's more quietly authoritative faces, its ground-floor loggia of Corinthian columns opening directly onto the water. The interiors, conceived by Milanese designer Tiziano Vudafieri of Vudafieri-Saverino Partners, navigate the expected tension between palazzo archaeology and contemporary hospitality without flinching in either direction. Guest rooms layer white resin floors and upholstered canopy bed structures — their headboards worked in dark patterned fabric — against exposed original timber ceiling beams in the upper-floor suites, while a striped wingback chair or a shot of teal in the bathroom trim supplies the note of graphic modernity that keeps the whole from feeling like a museum. The bar is the most resolved space: cardinal-red curved banquettes running beneath double-height crimson-panelled walls, illuminated side tables casting warm pools across dark stone floors, the Gothic arched windows framing the canal at night like a Venetian painting with the lights left on. A polished steel sculpture on the loggia terrace completes the argument that this is a building comfortable enough in its own history to welcome the present in.

Book with PB and get cash back

Ca Maria Adele

Venice, Italy • Dorsoduro • OVER THE TOP

avg. $945 / night

Includes $50 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Ca Maria Adele Design Editorial

Facing the Campo della Salute in Dorsoduro, with the domed silhouette of Santa Maria della Salute visible just steps away, a sixteenth-century palazzo houses one of Venice's most theatrically conceived small hotels. Ca Maria Adele was created by the Naj-Oleari family — the same Milanese dynasty behind the iconic graphic textile brand — and that decorative instinct runs through every room. Rather than imposing a single aesthetic across the property, the hotel assigns each of its fourteen rooms a distinct personality: one is wrapped in indigo-and-gold damask with carved Moorish furniture and a turbaned statue standing sentinel beside the bed, another in deep aubergine with burnished wallpaper and pair of chocolate leather club chairs printed with bird illustrations that carry the slightly surrealist warmth of a Venetian cabinet of curiosities. The public rooms carry a different register — polished terrazzo floors catch the arched canal-facing windows in the restaurant, where Murano glass chandeliers hang above floral-upholstered Louis XV-style armchairs and banquette seating in faded rose. The rooftop terrace, furnished in teak decking with long modular sofas and Venetian blackamoor masks mounted along the wall, gives the property an unexpectedly contemporary outdoor space within its otherwise deliberately antique interior logic. The canal entrance, approached by an ornate iron bridge, establishes the arrival experience at night as something closer to theatre than hospitality — which, at Ca Maria Adele, is entirely the point.

Book with PB and get cash back

Londra Palace Venezia

Venice, Italy • Casetllo • OVER THE TOP

avg. $867 / night

Includes $46 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

Londra Palace Venezia Design Editorial

Facing the Riva degli Schiavoni from the Castello sestiere, with Verrocchio's equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni rising from the campo just beyond its terrace, this stretch of nineteenth-century neoclassical facade carries one of Venice's more quietly resonant literary footnotes: Tchaikovsky composed his Fourth Symphony here in 1877. That the building became Londra Palace Venezia, a 53-room hotel assembled from two adjacent palazzi, feels entirely consistent with a city that layers biography onto stone as naturally as it layers tide onto marble. The interiors work a register of restrained Venetian opulence — damask wallcoverings in silver-grey and warm gold, Murano glass chandeliers casting amber light across terrazzo floors in the dining room, and bedroom schemes built around deep aubergine and chocolate tones anchored by gilt-framed headboards and walnut veneer case pieces. The restaurant presents a long, mirror-lined room where the ceiling carries a gilded Venetian plaster finish and cream banquette seating runs the full length beneath silver damask walls, the whole space given rhythm by a progression of Murano chandeliers diminishing toward the far end. Outside, a first-floor terrace with teak decking and cantilevered steel railings opens directly onto the lagoon-facing arcade, offering an evening perch that few hotels in this city can match for unmediated exposure to the particular blue hour light that settles over the bacino before dark.