Feeling at home in Casa Fortunato

Filipa Fortunato and her family

António Costa Lopes, married to Casa Fortunato’s director Filipa Fortunato and responsible for the architecture project, tells us that they had shared the idea of opening a hotel for a long time -but when he and his brother decided to move their architecture firm to a new location, the couple decided to seize the opportunity.

A hundred-year-old Pombaline building

Filipa and António knew from the start that they wanted to have the hotel and their home in the same venue. To do so, António explains, “It was essential to find a building with enough space for the guest rooms and large common areas.” The house he had used as an office for his architecture firm met all those requirements: a hundred-year-old Pombaline building, located on the corner of a tree-lined avenue in Lisbon’s residential Amoreiras neighborhood.

Interior of Casa Fortunato

The ground floor, which you enter through a light-filled hallway with white marble floors, is where the common areas are gathered: the living room, the dining room, and the adjoining bulthaup kitchen. A graceful spiral staircase leads to the main upper floor with the hotel’s nine rooms. Above it, an added new floor, discretely set back from the main façade, is now the family’s private home.

Filipa Fortunato's daughter

Home-like interiors

The decoration is different in each one of the guest rooms, combining the original architectural elements -high ceilings, French fireplace mantels, wainscoting and antique woodwork- with an eclectic combination of furniture from different periods, a large part of which is the result of António and Filipa’s passion for collecting. Geometric-patterned wallpaper alternates with solid-color walls, Moroccan rugs, and cement floor tiling, as in the dining room. The result is a delightful combination of the informal warmth of a bed & breakfast and the refinement of an exclusive hotel.

Interior of Casa Fortunato

As António says, the idea was to create a home-like atmosphere, “where the rooms are different in every single way: in their forms, their layout, their colors, and almost all the decoration.”

Filipa Fortunato's family in the kitchen

A b2 kitchen as the gathering point

One of the best examples of the hotel’s philosophy is the kitchen/dining room. This large rectangular space on the ground floor, with cement tile flooring in shades of ochre, once again brings together tables, chairs, sideboards and decorative elements from a variety of periods and styles, all lit by large windows facing the street and the inner courtyard. One of the sides features the kitchen, with its two bulthaup b2 workbenches, and, against the back wall, a b3 functional line that houses the appliances, cooking utensils, and water point.

Casa Fortunato bulthaup kitchen

As António says, “having a bulthaup was an essential requirement; it was always part of the project. The idea was that the first thing you would see when you walked into the living room would be two b2 workbenches -so simple, yet so powerful. That’s where the food is prepared and served, where people gather and chat. It’s the place where everything comes together.”

Photographer: Adrian Pedrazas Profumo

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