Inside Venice homes
Lot size is the whole story. A parcel here is often thirty by ninety feet, and what stands on it might be a 1920s beach bungalow nobody has ever touched, or a three-storey steel-and-glass rebuild by an architect whose name is on the mailbox. Sometimes they are next door to each other. Cleaning the first is careful work on original fir floors and painted beadboard; cleaning the second is glass, exposed concrete and a roof deck.
Access shapes the day more than anything else. Houses along the Canals and on the walk streets have no vehicle frontage at all. The garage, where there is one, opens onto a rear alley, and the front of the house faces a footpath. Crews park behind or on the nearest street and carry everything in, and we build that into the arrival window instead of discovering it at the door.
What we walk into in Venice
Small footprints, hard surfaces, a lot of stairs. Older stock is 700 to 1,400 square feet of bungalow with fir or oak floors, single-pane windows and a bathroom the size of a closet. The rebuilds go three levels with polished concrete, floating stairs, frameless glass and a roof deck, and they show fingerprints on everything. Sand arrives continuously, through the front door, off bicycles and out of dog fur, and it scratches every hard floor on the street.