On previous visits to Venice, my attention had always been fixed on Carlo Scarpa. I had never realised that behind an ordinary grey stone wall lay Palazzo Fortuny.

Fortuny is known for its elegant textiles, now part of a century-old legacy. For someone trained in textiles, like my wife Linlin, it was naturally irresistible — perhaps more so than another Scarpa building.

Architecturally, Palazzo Fortuny is not immediately spectacular. What interested me was how Mariano Fortuny gradually transformed it through renting, buying, repairing and adapting. He first rented the attic of this fifteenth-century palace as a studio, then acquired the lower floors as his career developed, turning the building into a home, workshop, laboratory and exhibition space.

Here, Fortuny and his wife Henriette Negrin developed fabrics and garments together. The Delphos gown, with its fine pleats, allowed cloth to cling naturally to the body, giving softness an almost architectural structure.

His printed fabrics are equally fascinating. Unlike ordinary prints, where pattern often sits flatly on cloth, Fortuny used irregular dyeing, fading, pile direction, ground colour and metallic reflection to make pattern emerge from within the material.

It feels closer to architecture than decoration: not painting an image onto a surface, but allowing material, light and time to produce one.