Tempting Fado

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Olivier Café

Photo by Bruno Espadana

Sticking out from Europe like a hitchhiker’s thumb, Lisbon is riding the wealth that came with Portugal’s adoption of the euro in 1999. Olivier Café opened barely a year ago, just in time for the city’s hosting of the MTV awards, but a few doors down, there are still boarded-up buildings on some of Lisbon’s most valuable real estate. António de Oliveira Salazar’s 36-year dictatorship and the subsequent regime only ended in 1974, and leftovers from that period include rent-controlled apartments in beautiful crumbling buildings that still go for $28 a month. At Confeiteria Cister, one of the city’s classic pastelarías, a pair of diminutive espressos and supersize custard tarts rings in at $4. You can’t help but feel the city is a strange work in progress, one part seemingly Eastern bloc, one part Western Europe. I wake up the first morning convinced the alarm is set to Radio Moscow as the thick and inscrutable phonetics come at me with a Stalinesque seriousness. Jorge’s first studio was next door to the former headquarters of the secret police; now those headquarters are being turned into luxury condos. “I saw the windows where the people were jumping,” he told me. “So I design with that big responsibility, to represent some change.”

At stores like Nosso Design, NPC and the new “art supermarket” Mousse, contemporary Portuguese design shares shelf space with classics from the old regime, like Oprah’s favourite Claus Porto soap in its Art Deco sleeve. There are also luxe hampers from Uma Casa Portuguesa, stuffed with retro-kitsch packages of everything from the kind of soap bars that were sent to the colonies in the 1940s to, oddly, boxes of Canadian oats. The hampers now sell in Terence Conran shops in London and New York City’s hipster boutiques. At the atelier of fashion designer Ricardo Preto, 60-year-old seamstresses work beside their 24-year-old counterparts. “Everything is on a classic base,” he explains, “but then I give it this new mood of our generation.” Preto will cut a perfectly tailored suit jacket shorter than what is traditional and transform shirt sleeves into clever collars. The result is a kind of old-school Portugal meets high-design mash-up.

Aside from the parade of fashion shows, a pit stop at Museu do Design and a climb up to Castelo de São Jorge to take in the spectacular view, we mostly rip through the city like shoppers on a bender. We buy two extra carry-ons to lug home what we’ve now dubbed our fado-with-a-twist booty. This includes Luis Royal’s Fill bottle, a vase that looks like a plastic water bottle but is hand blown by Portuguese glassmakers MGlass and a pair of jeans by Wearplay – the Portuguese version of Diesel – where all the buttons have been chipped in half. We salivate over Sam Baron’s Slices of Design plates, which have had their edges sheared off and coated in white platinum, and are now on display at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. We take home a limited edition notebook by Serrote, which looks like placemat paper – because it is. The website says, with a wink, that the book is intended for “those who love to scribble the towels [placemats] of the restaurants.”

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