A small hotel in the Veneto, which the Maison's travel office had used, on behalf of members, for the better part of a decade, was sold last spring. The new ownership has taken the property in a different direction, with the assistance of a consultancy whose work in this category I have had, on other occasions, the misfortune to encounter. The house I remember will not return.
There were, when I first stayed there in 2014, eleven rooms and a single dining table at which all guests sat in the evenings. The proprietor, who was the second generation of his family in the property, conducted himself with a courtesy that was particular and sustained. The cook had been in the kitchen for twenty-six years. The garden was kept by a man whose family had kept the garden of the adjoining property since the early nineteen-sixties, and who had inherited the responsibility for the hotel's garden when the previous gardener retired without an apprentice.
There are, no doubt, reasons why the family sold. The sums offered were, by current standards, substantial, and the next generation has its own preferences. I do not write to second-guess the decision. I write only to record, briefly, what is no longer available to be visited, and to remark — without bitterness, and with some recognition that the same observation has been made many times before — that the houses I most often recommended to members are, on the whole, less likely to be standing in their present form ten years from now than the houses I would not have recommended at all.
There are still, I should add, perhaps a dozen comparable houses in the region, and the Maison's relationships with them remain in good order. They are conducted, in each case, by families or proprietors who have, at present, declined the offers that have inevitably been made. We continue to recommend them, and we continue to be grateful, in a quiet and private way, for the particular form of stubbornness that has kept them open.
— Henry Ashford-Vane, June 2025