The Salizada San Moisè, Venice’s answer to Madison Avenue or Bond Street, is a sad sight. Right off its namesake square, the once glittering Hotel Bauer is swathed in gauzy white tarpaulins stretched tightly over a scaffolding frame.
We create a place of entire well-being, exclusively for you, proclaims the signage on the ground level of the construction site. But it’s not clear what—if anything—is underway. There hasn’t been any drilling or hammering since late December, when Signa Group, the Austrian real-estate conglomerate that bought the Bauer in 2020, collapsed into insolvency.
The only noise comes from the rowdy gondoliers who moor their boats in the canal next door while pleading for business over the sloshing water. Progress toward its reopening—under the Rosewood flag, no less—has stalled, leaving the landmark in limbo. Locals remain baffled. “I’ve heard nothing,” says one American expatriate. “And I haven’t seen bodies going in for some time.” The Italian press reports that employees haven’t been paid since last February.
It’s a sad fate for the hotel that counted everyone from Prince Charles to Marilyn Monroe and Daniel Craig as guests. The Bauer (or Grand Hôtel d’Italie Bauer-Grünwald, as it was known when it opened, in 1880) was immortalized almost at birth, featuring prominently in Anton Chekhov’s 1893 novella An Anonymous Story.
Its most glorious days arrived in the postwar, dolce vita era. Under the regime of then owner Arnaldo Bennati, a wealthy Ligurian shipbuilder, the Bauer closed for a decade-long renovation. When its spectacular modernist wing opened, in 1949 on the Campo San Moisè, it usurped all the other Gothic piles that Venice was known for—including its rival, the five-star Danieli.
The Bauer retained its supremacy for the next four decades. In the late 90s, Bennati’s granddaughter Francesca Bortolotto Possati took over the property. The Bauer entered another golden period, propelled by its parties, especially an annual rooftop bash during the Redentore festival, in late July. (London hospitality impresario Robin Birley installed a pop-up version of his club Loulou’s in the Bauer’s bar during the Biennale.)
In 2019, Possati sold the hotel and has turned her attentions to the vineyards she’d also inherited. (Bennati Wines occupies a 450-acre wine-making estate in Friuli-Venezia Giulia.) The Bauer’s buyer, the American investment firm Elliott, flipped it to Signa barely a year later. That’s when the real problems started.
It’s a sad fate for the hotel that counted everyone from Prince Charles to Marilyn Monroe and Daniel Craig as guests.
Founded in the late 90s by a bold investor named René Benko, Signa always had a fondness for trophy assets. Its first success was buying Lanserhof, the medical spa in Lans beloved by billionaires and tech bros, and flipping it at a handsome profit. Benko, who lives in Innsbruck (presumably with his Picasso), became one of Austria’s richest men. In 2019, Signa and RFR Holding acquired New York’s Chrysler Building for $150 million; in 2021, they became an owner of the Selfridges department-store company, in the United Kingdom.
“I understand the number it was sold for was outrageous—Signa came in at the last minute and paid more than anyone else,” says a local familiar with the Bauer’s sale process. “They overpaid from the outset.” (Bloomberg reported that Signa secured a $147 million loan around the time it acquired the property, though it is not clear how much was earmarked for the transaction.)
As soon as the sale was announced, Signa declared its plans to close it at the end of 2022 and embark on another makeover. According to locals, the problems were evident from the start.
“We saw things we had never seen,” says one. “They were putting so much weight on the building, I know they had to shore up the fondamenta—the wood sticks that hold up buildings here—because it was about to collapse.”
To those who revered the Bauer’s understated elegance, the new plans were head-scratching. “Apparently they wanted to build a pool on the top floor,” says another resident, horrified by the thought. “And they wanted to make the entrance hall into a mall, with different shops all divided up.”
Soon, the Bauer’s interiors were stripped, and the contents were off-loaded at a Paris auction last spring. (In hindsight, this may have been a Hail Mary attempt to replenish Signa’s coffers.) The 4,000 lots, which earned $1.6 million, included Murano glassware and custom silks from Rubelli. A pair of handmade, 50s-era reproductions of 17th-century sconces topped with Venetian lions brought in $232,000. Clearly, one buyer remembered them fondly from the great reception hall.
Meanwhile, at Signa, things worsened. Benko is now under investigation in Austria and Germany for charges of fraud and money-laundering. Benko’s holding company and two of its main real-estate companies declared insolvency in November. Benko filed for personal insolvency in March, and most of Signa’s assets have been sold or are going into receivership.
“I walk by the Bauer every day, and it’s a shell now,” says movie producer Stuart Parr, who lives in a nearby palazzo on the Grand Canal. “It’s bad enough that the company’s stripped of cash, but for the building to be stripped of its furnishings is even worse. Shame on them.”
“I hope the beautiful stairs are still there,” says Toto Bergamo Rossi, a local restorer and director of the preservation organization Venetian Heritage. “But the interior was not landmark-listed, because it was built at the beginning of the Second World War. The Ministry of Culture never showed any interest in it.”
What happens next? The Bauer’s alleged 2025 opening is still featured on Rosewood’s Web site; a spokesperson for the company confirmed that it is still involved in the project. Was it on track to open next year? Rosewood couldn’t say, and a representative for Signa declined to comment. The firm’s administrators invited offers to buy the property outright, and a deal was recently finalized with King Street Capital, which is also taking over the Danieli and rebooting it as a Four Seasons Hotel, scheduled for 2025. Whether or not the Bauer’s Rosewood partnership will survive this ownership change remains to be seen. No matter what, though, Venice’s onetime rivals will soon be sister properties.
Venice’s fondness for scuttlebutt would dwarf Blair Waldorf’s, so locals have their own theories. “On the telefono senza fila, I was told it was going to be a Mandarin Oriental,” says one, using the Italian term for “bush telegraph.” She suggested that the foundational construction work has been completed, and an opening could be viable for 2025. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the rival chain simply said, “Mandarin Oriental has no plans for Venice.”
Whatever happens, when the Venice Biennale’s festivities kick off, on April 17, the V.I.P.’s will suffer without their clubhouse. “One year, I remember scanning the Bauer bar around 10:30 and counting over 20 American museum directors and curators hobnobbing with collectors and artists over steeply priced Negronis,” recalls John Melick, who runs the publicity firm Blue Medium.
“It was so exciting: you could be in the lobby and catch anyone you wanted to all day long,” remembers Desiree Bravin, a former Californian who’s lived in Venice for two decades. “Just unbelievably beautiful.” Let’s hope that the party returns—in some form—before it’s forgotten entirely.
As he says, Mark Ellwood focuses on “froth in all its forms.” He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Pursuits, the creator and a co-host of Bloomberg’s Travel Genius podcast, and the author of Bargain Fever: How to Shop in a Discounted World