In the spring of 2023, a five-day sale was held in Paris to auction off more than 10,000 objects that had made up Venice’s beloved Bauer Hotel. Everything had to go: hundreds of yards of heavy Rubelli silks, wrought-iron terrace furniture, silver champagne buckets engraved with the Bauer Venezia insignia. A smoked-glass mural depicting La Serenissima, which had welcomed guests in the lobby, was dismantled into pieces and sold off. From poster beds and rococo chairs to the room keys, all of the knick-knacks accumulated over a 140-year period were distributed to the highest bidders.

Though the absence of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini will be missed by those attending the 2025 Biennale Architettura, it’s the loss of the now boarded-up Bauer Hotel that stings the most for me. The storied five-star stay on the Grand Canal was an after-dinner staple and the trek along the length of the hotel’s luxurious lobby was a rite of passage for visitors and exhibitors alike. The bar, with the waters of the Grand Canal lapping below the balustrades and an Italian Lady Liberty surveying the action, was the place to see the architecture and design industry’s great and good in conversation over cigarettes and negronis.

Before it was masked by scaffolding and hidden beneath hoardings, the Bauer was a glimpse of the true Venice: an elegant grande dame that could at times seem slightly tired of its own opulence. It was a place where one might have rubbed shoulders with celebrities at the bar, clinked glasses with a sheikha or talked property with a European prince or US tycoon. By the end of the evening, emerging out of the golden foyer, inevitably slightly dazed, it would already be unclear whether any of it had actually happened. The Bauer wouldn’t tell – after more than a century of inviting travellers in, the walls had seen their fill of fantastical events.

The Bauer sailed on until 2019, when its owners, the Bortolotto P0ssati family, announced its sale to US funds, which then passed it on to an Austrian property company, Signa, in 2020. The lagoon seemed to let out a sigh, though it’s not the first time that a Venetian institution passed into the hands of foreign investors. The new owners promptly announced a top-to-bottom renovation in 2022 – cue the auction – and an eventual reopening as a Rosewood-managed hotel.

Little more than six months later, it emerged that Signa was over €15bn in debt and would have to file for bankruptcy. The company had towers under construction in Berlin and Hamburg, and owned prime properties in many global capitals. I was in Venice on the day that construction halted at the Bauer, after Signa stopped honouring its payments. Inclined to snoop, I walked up to the scaffold, which still hopefully advertised the reopening of a “new Bauer” in 2025 as I approached a small wooden door that served as the construction-site entrance.

It was unlocked. Inside, a security guard was dozing in his booth. It was just past 08.00 but nobody was at work. Past the turnstile, I saw the floor that had previously hosted the Bauer’s velvety, low-lit bar and lobby. The entire building, which is made up of a 19th-century palazzo and a modernist annex, had been gutted with only the structural concrete columns left standing. The grande dame looked like an abandoned parking garage.

After a feverish ping-pong match over ownership between multinational investors, allegedly including Bernard Arnault’s lvmh, the property was auctioned for €309m in late 2024 to Mohari, another property conglomerate. The investment that has flowed into the Bauer since 2019 is dizzying and Mohari committed an additional €150m to completing the renovations. My only question is this: for what? I never heard anyone complain about the facilities at the old Bauer. And what will be the result of this expensive saga? Another chain hotel filled with contract furniture?

The Bauer’s valuation is for its prime location on the Grand Canal but also for the position that it occupies in the city’s – and visitors’ – psyche. There’s a further irony to the fact that the very magic that gave the hotel its worth and allure might be destroyed by the renovation that tries to heighten it. It’s futile to blame anyone in particular for the mess. Families want to sell, investors want to buy and architects want to work. But any biennale-goers who find themselves itching for a nightcap and no longer quite knowing where to go might do well to remember the lesson that often – in architecture, as in life – good things are best kept just as they are.