A DECADE OR so ago, Nicholas Ward-Jackson woke up one morning determined to get out of Venice. After nearly five years, the English art dealer and his wife, Margherita, an Italian psychotherapist, had outgrown their small home and were tired of the tourists. But the day before their scheduled return to London, where they have another residence, Ward-Jackson, now in his 80s, received a call from a real estate agent cousin of Margherita’s about a listing in Dorsoduro, a more intimate neighborhood separated from the crowded cafes of Piazza San Marco by the Grand Canal. Reluctantly, he agreed to tour the property: a 3,500-square-foot apartment on the piano nobile, or second floor, of a 17th-century palazzo. As he walked around the main hall — a “very scruffy” space, he recalls, with three bedrooms on one side and a study and the kitchen on the other — he was struck by how familiar it felt. On his way out, he bumped into an older woman. “Nicholas, how lovely to see you,” she said. “Are you back to buy your old flat?”
Ward-Jackson was surprised to realize that he’d spent time there as a teenager. His father, William, whose family owned part of a newspaper syndicate in South Africa, traveled regularly for work; during a few of his extended stays abroad, Ward-Jackson’s mother, Catherine, had rented that very apartment for herself, her eldest son and his two brothers. Although Ward-Jackson didn’t recognize the place, it must have left an impression: He had gone on to become a collector of works by 18th-century Veneto artists and, in the 1980s, he’d encouraged the English filmmaker Derek Jarman, who died in 1994, to direct “Caravaggio,” a movie that Ward-Jackson co-wrote about the life of the early 17th-century Baroque painter. Being in that sunlit hall again reminded him of all that he loves about Venice: the bookstores and the operas; late nights by the water (“I can’t really explain the quality of the darkness — it’s as if you’re being covered in velvet”).
The couple decided to give Venice another chance. To restore their new home, they hired Mariangela Zanzotto, an Italian architect and art historian known for preserving churches and other public buildings in the area. Margherita, in her mid-50s, and Ward-Jackson haven’t always shared the same ideas about design — she likes modern art and furniture; his taste skews more traditional — but they agreed on one important point: that the interiors should evoke the spirit of Venice without being too literal. “There’s always a temptation here to go for a really old look,” says Ward-Jackson on a blustery afternoon this past April. “But Mariangela made it quite contemporary.” Zanzotto, who worked on the project for nearly two years, sourced local materials such as Istrian stone for the countertops and Marmorino plaster (a combination of limestone and powdered marble) for the walls. “I don’t like to do something in a fake style,” she says. Her goal, she adds, was to “show the soul of Venice.”
Inside six very different family residences.
– Carl and Karin Larsson’s exuberant, art-filled houses in Sweden.
– An art dealer’s strangely familiar Venetian apartment.
– A mountain compound in Brazil where a big family found a way to live together and apart.
– Is it architecture or is it art? A Parisian couple celebrate the in-between.
– A family’s reimagined beach house in the Philippines.
– Brandon Flynn and Jordan Tannahill’s cinematic East Village apartment.
WARD-JACKSON IS sitting on a teal velvet sofa on the canal-facing side of the portego, a central reception area that runs the length of the building and is common in historic Venetian residences. On the wall above him, a pair of 18th-century paintings of regatta-winning Italian rowers — “rather kitsch,” he says — hang alongside a landscape photograph by the German artist Thomas Struth. The first thing one notices about the place is how quiet it is. The second is Gilbert & George’s “Lick,” a 95-inch-tall photocollage from the English duo’s 1977 series “The Dirty Words Pictures,” which combines self-portraiture with bleak images of urban life. “I’m not convinced it really works,” says Ward-Jackson about the placement of the piece, one of Margherita’s acquisitions, which is near an intricate chandelier with Murano glass flowers and a nickel-plated brass floor lamp designed in 1962 by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. “We thought we could make the entire space here full of contemporary photographs, but the trouble is that it all begins to look like a travel agency.” Zanzotto shakes her head and laughs.
To the left of the entrance, in the kitchen, a spiral staircase winds upward to a rooftop terrace with views of the backyard garden and the bell tower of St. Mark’s Basilica in the distance. Although Zanzotto kept some of the original tile work above the stove, she added a crushed-brick-and-lime pastellone floor and updated the room with sage-colored fir cabinets, brightly hued beech chairs by Gio Ponti and a resin-coated pendant light from Flos. In the study, she painted the walls a bold shade of terra cotta and balanced some existing elements — dark wood-beam ceilings, a decorative stone fireplace — with a few modern interventions: a sculptural Isamu Noguchi paper lamp; a circular Willy Rizzo coffee table in red lacquer and brass; and a leather Jean Prouvé armchair in burgundy. “I’d like to have it be a cozy space,” she says. “I don’t want it to be the kind of palace where you feel like, ‘Oh, I’m in a palace.’”
Ward-Jackson seems more interested in what’s on the walls than in the furniture, almost as if the history of Italy comes alive in two thick impasto paintings, depicting a tempest and a battle, by the early 18th-century Veneto artist Antonio Maria Marini; or a portrait of a young man from the school of the Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese. A member of Ward-Jackson’s staff emerges with some espresso, but he declines. “I’m sorry to be a bit decrepit today,” he says. Except for his employees, one of whom resides in a separate part of the house, or the odd friend or family member visiting from England, he’s often on his own; Margherita and their two teenage sons are now based in London. But Ward-Jackson can’t imagine being anywhere else. “To tell you the truth, I’ve gone rather mad,” he says with a wink. “I’ve got a terrible feeling I might be trapped here.”
Before excusing himself to go lie down, he lingers over an unattributed painting of an 18th-century German aristocrat who, he explains, fell in love with Venice and was almost adopted by the doge. “There have been lots of foreigners,” says Ward-Jackson, “but maybe no one quite as grand as him” — just another traveler who discovered himself in the city and decided to stay.
