- October 23, 2025
- Sarah Miller
Venice is design.
Under perfect blue skies, the Designhounds and SICAM buyers tours drifted through white-waked canals, the hum of outboards and inboards echoing off ancient churches and piazzas—all singing a familiar refrain: “Venice is design.” The city’s beauty proved a natural salon where designers and manufacturers mingled, forging connections over freshly caught fish, tender pasta, and the easy flow of wines and spritzes after each day of exploration and commerce.
Venice’s architecture intoxicates: Baroque, Rococo, and Moorish notes weaving the old with the new.
Yet nowhere is design more evident than on the water. Many boats are still handmade along the canals, crafted from seven species of wood—20-foot runs of straight oak, walnut, cherry, basswood, and more. Gondolas honor ancient materials and techniques; water taxis, built nearby, marry tradition with modern power and composites. Every vessel moves like a long, benevolent dragon, gliding with reverence for past and present. A taxi fashioned from mahogany, African sapele, teak, fiberglass, and a Volvo Penta might cost more than half a million dollars. But in Venice, cost is beside the point. What matters is the line, the flow, the respect and passion—the steady current of beauty over 1,600 years, spiced with Silk Road flavors that look east while answering “yes” from the west.
Venice may be sinking, yet it rises as well.
Designhounds founder Veronika and her team guided our posse through tours, dinners, and parties that brought us to the heart of design—from Murano glass (more on that soon) to private homes of developers, to world-renowned artists like Geoffrey Humphries, to a blues jam overlooking the Grand Canal. In the Serenissima, serendipity kept lifting her head above the water, again and again.
And as we rode from place to place, we found laughter and kinship—grace and common ground within commerce. It’s a deep laughter that will keep resonating in us and in our work, as we made friends with Venice and one another while gliding on her waters together.
About our tours:
This October marked the first ever double-header tour for Designhounds. First with a designer retreat in Venice and Parma with focus on the arts, antiques and vintage at Mercante in Fiera in Parma, treasure hunting for days in Parma’s thrift shops and learning about the hidden world of glass makers in Murano.
The second tour was sponsored by SICAM Expo in Pordenone, Europe’s leading components and materials show, owned privately by the Giobbi family and an endless resource for material inspiration technological innovation. This tour was comprised, for the first time ever, of a cross section of all industry constituents including designers, architects, media, dealers and manufacturers.
