Bairro Alto Hotel

Ochre vita. At mainland Europe's most westerly point, yellow trams run through the streets and the fronts of the old houses are often finished in yellow ochre. Building a new luxury hotel in the capital of “Azuleijos“ (traditional blue tile art) means acknowledging this. So the Bairro Alto Hotel, set in the part of town bearing the same name and frequented by Lisbon's jeunesse dorée, represented a fabulous face-lift for key elements of Portuguese fin de siècle design. The key colours are yellow and red ochre. You need a lot of imagination to add any element of surprise to contemporary bathrooms. Here's one surprise: the washbasin as an altar, celebrating water as the elixir of life.