NOUVEAU REACH
While visiting Venice for the Biennale two years ago, a Milanese couple was cycling around the Lido, the long, lean barrier island where locals traditionally summer, when they spotted a small Art Nouveau villa for sale. Nestled in the pretty neighbourhood behind the Grand Hotel des Bains, the long-shuttered fin-de-siècle palace where much of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was set, the villa was shrouded by an overgrown garden. Nevertheless, the couple could see it was charming and had great potential. They bought it and, keeping in the spirit of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival unspools each September, they rang award-winning Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who has a second, equally respected career in architecture and interior design, to renovate it. Guadagnino fell into the latter profession by chance eight…