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The pale blue facade of Vermelho with its carved stone window surrounds, above a terrace of fringed parasols and bistro chairs

Inspection · Melides, Alentejo, Portugal

Vermelho

Christian Louboutin's house in an Alentejo village, thirteen rooms and no two of them alike, where the red in the name is a promise the building keeps.

Garregueira, a junior suite with a balcony Virtuoso

Book Vermelho with me, through Classic Travel Register first, free of charge, and the rates and partner benefits open up, with the account linked to Wheresnik. Tell me your dates before you book and I will say which room to ask for here, and which week I would avoid.

Vermelho is the Portuguese word for red, and the name is a promise the building keeps in every room. It is a hotel in the sense that you can sleep in it, and almost no other. Christian Louboutin fell for Melides years ago and made it his refuge, and what he has built in the middle of the village is part game, part baroque jewel, part living museum, and part private house that happens to take guests. Thirteen rooms, no two of them alike, and hardly one of the usual conventions of hospitality observed anywhere in it.

The carved stone door surround and wall panels at Vermelho above a courtyard paved in black and white tiles
The stone over the door and the pavement under your feet. Neither is doing less work than the other.

The road, and the village

Leave Lisbon by the bridge and the traffic is gone within a few minutes. The road runs south through Comporta, where the beaches go further than you can see and a scattering of beach bars and small odd hotels have turned the stretch into something like a Riviera that nobody has tidied up yet. Melides is further on, quieter, still mostly itself. The village has the air of somewhere remote in Mexico crossed with the good manners of the Hamptons, which is a sentence I would not have believed before I saw it.

A boardwalk crossing the dunes at Comporta towards the Atlantic under a wide cloudy sky
Comporta, an hour from Lisbon and empty in December, which is most of the argument for December.
A cobbled street of whitewashed houses in Melides with a hanging ceramic pot and the church tower beyond
The village street, with the church at the end of it and a car parked where a donkey used to be.
The interior of a small Melides shop with hand-painted ceramics laid out on cloth covered tables under a bamboo ceiling
One of the new shops. Local ceramics, flowers, a concept store: all of them slightly strange here, which is the interesting part.

The village is changing around the hotel, and visibly. Shops have appeared that would have made no sense here a few years ago, and each one stands out against the whitewash and the cobbles. Whether that survives contact with the next five years is a fair question. For now the contrast is what makes the place worth walking.

The house

The building was reworked by the architect Madalena Caiado and the whole of it reads as a tribute to Portuguese craft: glazed ceramic, wrought iron, frescoes painted by hand, pastel colours shot through with the red of the name. The facade is the pale blue of the sky, and the carved ceramic that wraps every window and door is the work of the sculptor Giuseppe Ducrot. It is the first thing you see and it tells you immediately that restraint is going to play no part in this.

The carved stone gateway at Vermelho with its studded timber door and the Vermelho sign beside it
The gate from the street. Before you are inside, the house has already told you what it is.
Looking up the pale blue facade of Vermelho to the carved window surrounds against the sky
From directly underneath, where the blue of the wall and the blue above it stop being distinguishable.
A white chimney with a scatter of small dark ceramic birds fixed to it against a deep blue sky
Ceramic birds up a chimney. Somebody thought of this and then somebody made them.

Inside, the references stop being Portuguese and become everything else at once. France, Spain, Morocco and India turn up in the same rooms and often on the same wall. Nothing is left plain. Every surface has been given something to do, and the sheer quantity of pattern in one room would be exhausting if it had been done with less conviction. After an hour you stop counting and start enjoying yourself, which I suspect is the design. The house belongs to Relais & Châteaux and carries two Michelin Keys.

The facade of Vermelho seen over a bed of red canna lilies and a lemon tree in fruit
Red planted against blue, in December, in a garden barely two years old.
Plumes of pampas grass in front of the pale blue carved facade
The pampas was put there to be looked through, and it is.
The white buildings, lawns and pool of Vermelho seen from an upper terrace
The whole property from above. The village starts again just past the hedge.

The Indian Lounge

If one room explains the place it is this one. Beams painted in the exact red of the name, under a ceiling of bamboo. A floor of white and green checks in Portuguese tile. Velvet armchairs the colour of face powder, by Pierre Yovanovitch, which are the most comfortable things in the building by a distance. Tea and soft drinks stand out all day and nobody arrives to ask whether you want something. I went in to look at it and came out an hour and a half later, which is the only review that matters.

The Indian Lounge at Vermelho with red beams under a bamboo ceiling and pink velvet seating on a green and white checkerboard floor
Red beams, bamboo overhead, green checks underfoot and powder pink in between. It should fight and it does not.
A salon with coloured glass pendant lanterns, a chaise longue and frescoed pink walls
Coloured glass hung over a room whose walls are already busy. It works.
A room with a deep green sofa, a red and white diamond floor and a bicycle propped against the wall
A bicycle parked indoors on a diamond floor, under a painting. Nobody moved it for the photograph.

The corridors are treated as rooms in their own right, which in most hotels would be a waste and here is the point. The floors change as you walk, the stairs have their risers tiled, and there are small lit recesses holding one object each.

A long corridor at Vermelho with a red and white diamond tiled floor and frescoed walls
The corridor to the rooms. Few hotels spend anything here.
A whitewashed staircase with green patterned tiles set into each riser
The risers are tiled and the treads are left plain, so the pattern climbs with you.
A thick white arch framing a room beyond with a deep red tiled floor
Through the arch the floor turns red. The house changes key from room to room.
Vermelho lit from the garden at night, with the lawn and flowerbeds in front of the blue facade
From the garden after dinner. The lit windows are the best argument the facade makes.

The room

I had Garregueira, a junior suite with a balcony over the garden. The thirteen rooms each have their own character and nothing carries over from one to the next, so this is the rare house where asking which one you are getting is worth the effort. Most have a terrace, and nearly all of them face the garden and the pool.

A bedroom at Vermelho with a tiled headboard, a yellow armchair and a chevron parquet floor
The bed stands against a wall of tile and the floor runs away in chevrons. Neither gives way.
An unmade bed in the morning light with the tiled headboard behind it
The morning after, before anybody came to put it right.
A yellow armchair in a corner under a window, above a dado of blue and white azulejos
The corner you end up in, which every room here seems to have.

The detail is where the money went. The linen is Frette, the bathroom holds Kama Ayurveda in rose and jasmine, there is a Nespresso machine and a kettle for tea, and the towels carry a red V with a little tasselled lamp worked into it. A television arrives only if you ask for one, which tells you plainly what the house thinks you should be doing with the evening.

A white pillow embroidered with a red V against a wall of sun patterned azulejos, lit by a brass shell sconce
The V is on everything, and on the pillow it is the last thing you see.
A lit lamp in a tiled alcove beside the head of a bed
A light set into the wall beside the bed, because a lamp on a table would have been ordinary.
A cushion embroidered with the words Vida Dura beside painted ceramics on a table
Vida dura, the hard life, embroidered on a cushion in a house like this. Somebody has a sense of humour.

The bathrooms run to green striped tile and pale marble, with a rain shower and a tub, and they are the one part of the house where the pattern calms down enough to let you think in the morning.

A bathroom at Vermelho with green and white striped tiling, a marble surround and a deep tub
Green stripes and marble. This is the house being quiet.
Kama Ayurveda bottles and a rolled towel embroidered with a red V, beside flowers under a brass shell sconce
Rose and jasmine, flowers picked that morning, and the V again.
A treatment room in the spa at Vermelho with a bed and a wall of small lit panels
The spa is one room and a wall of little lights. It knows how big the house is.

Eating

Xtian is the restaurant and it changes character between lunch and dinner. By day it reads as a bistro and the hand-painted tableware from the village does most of the decorating. At night the candles come out and the same room turns into somewhere else entirely, which is a trick worth seeing done twice in one stay. The cooking is Portuguese and it is playful about it.

The dining room at Xtian with a coffered ceiling, patterned floor and tables laid in white
The main room at Xtian in daylight, before the candles change its mind.
A table at Xtian laid with hand-painted plates from Melides and a printed menu
Every plate on the table was painted in the village. None of them match and that is deliberate.
The bar at Vermelho with its hammered silver counter, tiled walls and red tiled floor
The bar counter is hammered silver, made by silversmiths, and it is open day and night.
A bottle of Portuguese olive oil standing beside a basket of bread on a patterned table at Xtian
The oil comes to the table before anything else does, which tells you where the kitchen is looking.
Eggs with hollandaise over asparagus on a green patterned plate, with a glass of red wine behind
The plate underneath competes with the food. It usually wins.
A breakfast tray with juice, coffee, bread and preserves laid out on a patterned cloth
Breakfast in the room, included, and the reason to stay in bed an hour longer.

Breakfast came to the room at no extra charge, which is close to unheard of at this level and is the single best thing on the list of what the stay includes. It arrives composed, on a cloth, with the ceramics doing their work again.

The pool, the sun, and December

The pool stays open all year. In the middle of December only the brave get into it and I was not among them. The loungers beside it are a different proposition: I lay out there in the afternoon sun for a full hour, in a garden still filling in, with the white buildings on one side and the blue facade on the other. There is a spa as well, small and useful, scaled honestly to a house with thirteen rooms.

The turquoise pool at Vermelho below the white walls and terraces of the property
Open all year. In December the water is a spectator sport.
Sun loungers and a fringed parasol on a terracotta terrace above the pool
The loungers earn their keep in winter, which the pool does not.
Two sunburst timber loungers with white cushions on a terracotta terrace against a wall of azulejos
Loungers cut like sunbursts, against a tiled wall. Even the furniture is showing off.

Advisor's perspective

Vermelho suits a traveller who enjoys being surprised by a building and has no interest in being soothed by one. Two people who like looking at things will be happy here for three or four days, with the car for the beaches and the village on foot. It is a poor fit for anybody who wants a resort, a long spa menu, or a room that looks like the one in the brochure, and it would be wasted on somebody who intends to stay by the pool and read.

Two nights was enough to see it and slightly less than enough to use it. Three would let you take Comporta properly on one day and do nothing at all on another, which is the right shape for this part of Portugal.

The season is the other thing I would change about most people's plans. Everybody comes in summer, when the coast is full and the village is not quite its own. The warm months run long here, and a December stay gives you the same house with the lights on, the beaches to yourself, and an hour of sun by the pool if you want it.

A straw basket holding a straw hat with a Vermelho ribbon and a red tassel
The hat in the basket, waiting for a summer I did not stay for.

Before you book

The questions people send me about Vermelho.

How do I get to Melides from Lisbon, and do I need a car?
You need a car. You cross the bridge out of the city and within a few minutes the traffic has gone, and the road runs down through Comporta, with its beaches and its beach bars, before it reaches Melides further south. The drive is a pleasure in its own right and it is the reason to leave early and stop on the way. There is no version of this stay where you arrive and never move again, because the point of the place is partly the landscape it sits in.
Is December a bad time to go?
No, and it may be the best time. The warm season in this part of Portugal runs long, the village belongs to itself again once the summer people have gone, and the light in the afternoon is the kind you remember. The pool is open all year and in December it is for the brave, but the loungers beside it are another matter: I lay in the sun there for an hour in the middle of the month. The house was decorated for Christmas and it suited it.
How many rooms are there, and are they really all different?
Thirteen, and yes. Each one has been given its own character and nothing is repeated between them, which is unusual enough that choosing matters here more than it does almost anywhere. Most have a terrace and nearly all face the garden and the pool. I had Garregueira, a junior suite with a balcony, and I would take a balcony again.
Is it a beach hotel?
No. It stands in the middle of the village of Melides, with a garden and a pool of its own, and the beaches are a drive away. That is the arrangement to understand before you book: you are staying in a village in the Alentejo with the coast nearby, and the hotel is the reason to come as much as the sand is.
Is there a spa?
A small one, and it does what it needs to do. The house does not pretend to be a resort and the spa is scaled to a building with thirteen rooms in it. If a long treatment list is what you are travelling for, this is the wrong house, and I would say that is to its credit.

Something else you want to know? Write to me and I will answer it here.

The whitewashed church of Melides with its blue trimmed bell tower above the cobbled square A red and white striped beach towel printed Loubi's on the Beach, folded on a green cushion Anne Semonin bottles on a shelf in the spa, in dappled afternoon light A white ceramic teapot and a handwritten card from the hotel on a dark table A thick arched window framing the pale blue carved facade of the building opposite A marble balustrade and stone column on an upper terrace looking over the white rooftops

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