Leaning into Lisbon
Before I hit the ground for Lisbon Design Week coverage, I spent 3 days getting a lay of the land in Portugal's capital.
The month of May was spent almost entirely out of my apartment: first I went to California for a week and a half for beach time and a wedding, then I came home into the thick of New York Design Week and had just four days to soak that up until it was time to depart to Lisbon. The first half of my trip to Lisbon was for pleasure, the other half was to cover Lisbon Design Week.
I’d never been to Portugal and didn’t know exactly what to expect. Still, Lisbon surprised me! I expected it to be smaller than it was, but there was a lot more variety than I anticipated. For the first part of the trip—which was about two and a half days, after you account for the hour and a half waiting to get through customs—I stayed in the overtouristed (but very beautiful) neighborhood of Alfama. Later, I stayed near the Marquês do Pombal.
Alfama is the oldest district of the city and only local traffic is allowed to drive through, leaving the streets mostly to pedestrians. It reminded me of the old parts of Quebec City—very hilly, super compact streets, always navigating to take into account where the staircases are instead of being stuck walking up the steepest incline. When I had bad chronic pain it would have been kind of a nightmare to end up in a city that’s this hilly, but luckily I don’t have the same problems anymore. I found it really charming—and very satisfying to eventually know where I was going without looking at a map despite the winding roads.
My mom met me in Lisbon to spend my two and a half free days together. We spent the first day and a half going to a bunch of the tourist spots: seeing the Praça do Comércio (the big plaza that’s at the top of every Lisbon tourist guide), the Praça Dom Pedro IV (a plaza I loved because of its curvy cobblestone pattern and blooming jacaranda trees), the Praça dos Restauradores just nearby, and looking at a lot of buildings throughout Alfama including the Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora and the Lisbon Cathedral.
The highlight of this day and a half was probably going to the Museum of Portuguese Decorative Arts, a charming museum in a palace with Portuguese pieces from the 16th to the 19th centuries that have been repatriated by a collector. There was a lot of great marquetry on display and it felt like a good place to get an understanding of the distant history of Portuguese design before diving into the contemporary scene.
What I’ve found delightful from going to decorative arts or house museums in different countries in the past year or so is seeing furniture made from the different types of wood local to that place alone—or in this case, native to what was then a colony. I’m not really big on Rococo, but this “four table” which can be a three legged sidetable, or a four legged table that converts into a cards table, a tea table, or a table with an ivory checkerboard tickled me because its adaptability felt contemporary.
On our third day we got just slightly more off the beaten path and walked through the Moorish Quarter and Príncipe Real neighborhoods. We sat in the Jardim do Príncipe Real where there’s a huge 150+ year old cypress tree with its branches held up by a metal structure. At that point we ended up finding a map of locally owned businesses in Lisbon and checked out several of them.
One of the shops was Futah, a Portuguese towel brand. They sell fouta style beach towels (these are also known as hammam towels; they originate in Tunisia) in bright colors and patterns. Last year I’d seen a towel like this in Berlin and considered buying it because of how convenient a thinner towel feels like it’d be for beach days. I ultimately passed and I’ve thought about it no less than 10 times since so it felt like a sensible non-impulse buy. I got the Berlenga towel with red and aqua stripes and I’ve already brought it to the beach since getting back to New York. It’s very pleasing to travel around with something less bulky but no less stylish or absorbent.
We also went to Mundo do Livro, a really charming, multi-floor old book store that also sells engravings, antique maps, paintings, and a ton of prints that are already matted. I could have spent like three hours looking through everything in here, but in reality I just poked around for like 30 minutes. The matted print section has old landscape drawings categorized by country, so you could very easily find an 18th century rendering of Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, or wherever else.
We also hit A Vida Portuguesa’s Baixa location—I’d been wanting to go to the shop since I checked out their pop up at the MoMA Design Store last year (which I wrote about on Personal Space when it opened). I got some Ach. Brito stuff, which is more of a cool guy heritage bath and body company, then when we were walking around later on we went into Benamor 1925 which is a bath and body company with more of a corporate vibe. Still, I loved the scents (I got a jacaranda body wash and some other travel size stuff) and the packaging is pretty cute.
I tried the Humana thrift store location in Baixa and struck out, but the chain redeemed itself when the location in the Avenidas Novas neighborhood had a much better selection and I got five things for like 13 euros. On my last day in Alfama, I went to Quinn’s Vintage near my Airbnb and got a great deal on a leather bag and a silk top. She had a really impressive selection of silk shirts and embroidered shirts for such a small shop.
Then, after my three days of hopping around the city, I switched from my Airbnb to ME Lisbon, where I was hosted for Lisbon Design Week. It’s in a completely different part of the city, near Marquês de Pombal square. In the span of three days I met more Portugal–based designers and curators than I would have thought possible. Read about my takeaways from Lisbon Design Week on Dwell.
In other news:
I am looking for new bath towels, specifically ones with loops for hanging ideally. Please let me know if you have any recs…
My favorite show of New York Design Week reminded me of a long lost decor detail. I wrote about it for Dwell here. You still have two weeks left to see the show.
The MoMA Design Store’s summer sale is on right now. This tabletop mini vacuum is a great gift for a host / anyone with high standards. It’s so satisfying to use.
Leading up to the Knicks’s historic win, New Yorkers have spilled out onto the streets to watch them in the playoffs. I blogged about it for Dwell.
I wrote about a new framing trend and the post-Avant Basic internet interior for Prune.