Best design hotels in Lisbon

No other hotel in Lisbon looks like it. Two designers split the house: Lázaro Rosa-Violán, from Catalonia, took the public rooms, and Cristina Matos the bedrooms, where historical Portuguese materials and colours sit under tropical wallpaper. Palm prints, brass, velvet and dark wood carry through all 87 rooms and every corridor. The name is Roberto Ivens's, the explorer who crossed central Africa with Hermenegildo Capelo; Chiado has a street for each of them, and the hotel spans both.

The ground floor is where the look is laid on hardest. Rocco, up a red-carpeted stair from its own entrance, dresses as a traditional Italian osteria, its Terrazza is an inner garden laid out like an Italian courtyard, and in the Gastrobar a DJ plays vinyl to the room.

The design story here is architecture. What looks like one building on Praça Luís de Camões is four eighteenth-century houses, rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake around the Pombaline gaiola, a hidden timber cage. For the 2019 rebuild the Pritzker winner Eduardo Souto de Moura nearly doubled the floor area without touching the façades, and Atelier Bastir's interiors came out calm and recognisably Portuguese rather than international.

The detail is in the bathrooms: Carrara marble and handmade tiles in the Classic Tejo, a clawfoot bath in the Prestige Chiado, an antique bath in the Chiado Suite's daylit bathroom. The Mezzanine, half library and half bar, is the ground-floor room to linger in, and the Michelin Guide gives the hotel one Key.

A palace of around 1750, rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake and later let out floor by floor, until the Count of Verride, who arrived in 1910, made it one house again; a heavy remodelling in the 1970s undid some of that. The architect Teresa Nunes da Ponte and the interior designer Andrea Previ reversed the remodelling in a long restoration, and the hotel opened in December 2017 with eighteen rooms and suites.

The result mixes eras. The hotel describes its rooms in terms of simple lines and modern elegance, some keep original stucco and carved wooden ceilings, and the full palace decoration is in the Royal Suites. Guests describe a house that is grand in its bones rather than dressed up to look it. On the roof, the Sunrise Terrace bar looks all the way round, over the rooftops, the river and the bridge.