The best surf & design hotels · Comporta & Melides
Vermelho
Christian Louboutin spent more than twenty winters in Melides — the small Alentejo village ten minutes from the Atlantic coast — designing his winter collections, inspired by the light and the people he found there. The hotel is the outcome of that. Thirteen rooms in a traditional building in the centre of the village, designed by Lusitanian architect Madalena Caiado — who had already worked with Louboutin on his Lisbon house — with hand-painted frescoes by Greek artist Konstantin Kakanias, a carved façade by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ducrot, and red floor tiles commissioned from the craftsmen at Azulejos de Azeitão. The gardens were designed by French landscape architect Louis Benech. Restaurant Xtian serves Alentejo produce in tableware made by local artisans. Melides beach is a ten-minute drive; the Melides lagoon is a five-minute walk. Vermelho means red in Portuguese. The hotel earns it.
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The hotel
The Design
Twenty winters in Melides. The hotel is what happens when a designer has actually lived in a place before he builds anything.
Louboutin called on artisans from across Iberia and beyond — Ducrot's ceramics on the façade, Kakanias's frescoes inside, doors from Granada's Los Tres Juanes carpentry, Alentejo tiles from Azeitão. Each of the thirteen rooms is individually designed: frescoes, antique furniture, rare artworks, hand-painted tiles. Caiado's architecture holds the whole together without competing with any of it.
The Design
Twenty winters in Melides. The hotel is what happens when a designer has actually lived in a place before he builds anything.
Louboutin called on artisans from across Iberia and beyond — Ducrot's ceramics on the façade, Kakanias's frescoes inside, doors from Granada's Los Tres Juanes carpentry, Alentejo tiles from Azeitão. Each of the thirteen rooms is individually designed: frescoes, antique furniture, rare artworks, hand-painted tiles. Caiado's architecture holds the whole together without competing with any of it.
