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PortoBay Liberdade
Lisbon, Portugal · PortoBay · Core Luxury
Three centenary houses on Rua Rosa Araujo were stitched into one hotel here, and the seam is deliberate. Frederico Valsassina kept the 1910 facade with its Lioz limestone dressings up to the third floor, then set three frankly modern floors on top of it. Underneath, four levels were dug out for a spa with an indoor pool. The conversion won Best Tourism Development at the 2015 Premios Construir, the year it opened, and Bistro4 carries the name of Benoit Sinthon, the Michelin-starred chef from PortoBay's Cliff Bay in Madeira.
- 98 rooms
- Opened 2015
- Neighborhood: Avenida da Liberdade
- Rooms from 215 sq ft (20 m²)
- Architect: Frederico Valsassina
About PortoBay Liberdade
- Builders had to underpin the century-old facades on micropiles and excavate four basement levels through up to sixteen metres of fill before the hotel could rise.
- Deck7, the top-floor bar, comes with sun loungers and a jacuzzi. Aviator6 downstairs stocks more than three hundred different bottles and opens straight onto the street.
- This was PortoBay's eleventh hotel and its first in Lisbon, after six on Madeira, one in the Algarve and three in Brazil. It opened in March 2015 and was inaugurated on 23 April.
- The conversion cost 32 million euros and joined numbers 4 to 10 on the street into a single building of seven floors above ground and four below.
- Entry-level rooms start at 215 sq ft (20 m²).
History
PortoBay is a Madeira group, and by the time it looked at Lisbon it already had six hotels on the island, one in the Algarve and three in Brazil. What it found on Rua Rosa Araujo, a quiet street a couple of minutes off Avenida da Liberdade, was a row of centenary houses at numbers 4 to 10 whose ornamented early twentieth-century facade dated from around 1910 and carried handsome Lioz limestone dressings.
The engineering was the hard part. The facades were underpinned on micropiles while the buildings behind them were partly demolished, and the excavation went down four levels through a fill layer up to sixteen metres thick, held with an anchored Berlin-type retaining wall, props, slab bands and trusses. Architect Frederico Valsassina's answer to the join between old and new was to refuse to fake it: the historic facade runs up to the third floor, and three plainly contemporary floors sit above it, so the building reads as two distinct things at once. The project cost 32 million euros and produced seven floors above ground and four below.
The hotel opened in March 2015 and was formally inaugurated on 23 April, with 98 rooms: 26 classic, 45 superior, 15 deluxe, nine junior suites and three suites. The brief was an urban resort rather than a city hotel, which is why there is a spa with an indoor pool, sauna, Turkish bath and four treatment rooms, a gym, a street-facing bar with a terrace called Aviator6, and Deck7 on the roof with loungers, a bar and a jacuzzi. Bistro4 is signed by Benoit Sinthon, who holds a Michelin star at Il Gallo d'Oro in the group's Cliff Bay hotel in Madeira. In September 2015, months after opening, the building took Best Tourism Development at the Premios Construir.
The setting
Rua Rosa Araujo runs off the upper half of Avenida da Liberdade, close to Marques de Pombal, which gives the hotel the boulevard's shopping and its metro connections without the boulevard's traffic outside the window. That was the pitch from the start: an urban resort, quiet enough to be a retreat, central enough that you never need a car. Avenida and Marques de Pombal metro stations are both a short walk, the Baixa grid and Rossio are downhill, and Principe Real's gardens and design shops are a few streets west. Deck7 on the roof is where the location pays off, since the upper avenue is low-rise enough that a seventh floor sees a long way over the city.
Restaurants and bars
- Bistro4 — Restaurant · Chef Benoit Sinthon
- Deck7 — Restaurant
- Aviator6 — Restaurant
Awards
- Premios Construir, Best Tourism Development (Melhor Empreendimento Turistico) (2015)
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