Step Inside a Home in Venice Designed to Showcase a Rotating Collection of Blockbuster Art
Art patron and AMA Venezia founder, Laurent Asscher, highlights large-scale canvases within an ancient piano nobile apartment
Laurent Asscher, a Monaco-based tech entrepreneur and a visionary art collector, first visited Venice as a teenager, when one of his high school buddies invited him home for the holidays. Discovering the magical ancient city through the eyes of a native Venetian captured Asscher’s imagination and heart.
The feeling never left him, and some four decades later, he found himself searching real estate listings for a place of his own in Venice, a second home where he could live with works from his astonishing art collection. Begun with the acquisition of a Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2012, his trove has grown to more than 200 paintings and sculptures, including works by Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Jenny Saville, and Christopher Wool—many of them expansive in scale.
That made finding a suitable home next to impossible in Monaco, where real estate prices are astronomical and spaces tend to be minuscule. Venice, with its opulent architecture, beckoned. “Buying an apartment in Venice is buying a part of history; it’s like buying a piece of art,” he explains.
“I had four criteria,” Asscher recalls. “It had to be on the water. It had to have big walls and high ceilings. There had to be a way to bring huge paintings inside. And I didn’t want any frescoes, as you are not allowed to remove them.”
Asscher found the apartment that met his specifications inside a 15th-century Gothic building known as Palazzo Molin del Cuoridoro in the San Marco district. The palace had been built for a Venetian noble and more recently housed a bank before being converted in 2013 into residences by a developer. One of the last apartments to sell was on the second floor, what the Italians call the piano nobile.
“The palazzo was a commercial trading place a long time ago, which is why the living room, practically the size of a soccer field, is so huge,” Asscher notes. “Not that many people want a 3,200-square-foot home with only two bedrooms.”
A thorough refurbishment was carried out by the Venetian architect Alberto Torsello, who also worked on Asscher’s second Venice project, a magnificent space for contemporary art inside a 15th-century industrial building in Cannaregio. Called AMA Venezia, it debuted last spring during the Venice Biennale, with a selection of works from Asscher’s collection.
To update the palazzo apartment, Torsello installed new windows trimmed in stainless steel on the inside and wood on the outside, complementing both the minimalist interiors and the ancient Istrian stone façade. He stripped away the Laurent Asscher, a Monaco-based tech entrepreneur and a visionary art collector, ceiling’s dark brown paint to reveal the original woodwork—centuries-old beams now look glorious in their imperfection—while the walls were finished in pale marmorino plaster, which serves as a hushed backdrop for large paintings. The floors, meanwhile, received a layer of distinctive red magnesite terrazzo that unifies the rooms and withstands the moving of heavy artworks.
One of the architect’s most striking interventions is the area that doubles as the kitchen and the library, where he clad an entire wall in blackened steel. Upper bookshelves can be reached by a built-in ladder. “It’s beautiful but not the most convenient,” Asscher admits.
Throughout, the furnishings are a spare mix of choice vintage and contemporary designs. “I try not to put in too much,” he says. “This apartment is made for the paintings.” In the kitchen-library space, trim 1950s Pierre Paulin chairs join a curvy sofa and cocktail table by Vladimir Kagan, all under the luminous gaze of two squiggle canvases by Brice Marden and one of Christopher Wool’s playfully provocative text paintings.
At one end of the sprawling room that contains the living and dining areas, which span the width of the palazzo, Asscher placed a long, narrow table designed by Jean Nouvel to create intimacy among the 20 people it easily accommodates. To ensure he can host an even larger crowd, Asscher bought 35 vintage Jean Prouvé chairs with variously colored metal legs from his friend Patrick Seguin, the Paris design dealer.
At the room’s opposite end, sofas by Vincenzo De Cotiis flank a Chahan Minassian cocktail table crafted in Murano glass and bronze, while next to the soaring windows, a Steinway & Sons piano— played by Asscher’s daughter, Andrea—is bathed in light reflecting off the canal. Enormous paintings, including works by Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, and Richard Serra, augment the walls. “When I started collecting, I was told that it’s harder to sell big paintings,” Asscher recalls. “But when you build a collection, you have to buy the best, not what’s the easiest to sell.”
When he wants to rotate artworks, they come and go via a boat outfitted with a crane. For large pieces, scaffolding is assembled on the garden side of the apartment, some windows are temporarily removed, and the works are hoisted by a pulley system with ropes. Asscher usually does this in January—“the dead zone in Venice,” he says—so as not to disturb his neighbors too much.
The process may be arduous, but the results are transformational. “When you change even two paintings,” he says, “you go back home and it feels like you have a new apartment.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Late Fall Issue under the headline “The Venetian Scheme.” Subscribe to the magazine.