Splash! Porto

Splash! Porto

Nearly two years living in Madrid, and having never visited my neighbor Portugal, I was extremely pleased to be invited to the Hi:Design EMEA conference in Porto this spring.

Hi:Design EMEA Conference

The conference is built around an extremely effective (while exhausting!) format. Hotel operators and architects from throughout Europe are invited and face-to-face meetings are set up with fabricators and vendors that design everything from furniture and lighting to carpets and wallcoverings.

My colleague and I met with over 30 vendors in the course of two days, something akin to professional speed dating. It's a great conference, however, and we probably made a year's worth of contacts in a mere 48 hours, not to mention a couple friendships that will probably last a lifetime! It was a well balanced weekend of work, discovery and relaxation in a very unique city.

Tour of Porto
Casa da Música

We arrived in 40 minutes, one of the shortest flights I've taken in a long while. We made it just in time to join the tour arranged by the conference and piled into a bus filled with cheery design folks and headed to our first destination, Rem Koolhaas' Casa da Música, Porto's concert hall.

In complete contrast to its surroundings, this modern building sits like a chiseled gem on Avenida da Boavista, a main thoroughfare running through Porto. We were given a guided tour through its various rooms and marveled in the painstaking attention paid to acoustic challenges. The main concert hall is surrounded by a double wall of curved glass to serve as a buffer and to absorb all noise. An effective and also aesthetically graceful solution. Though the orchestra was practicing we couldn't hear them at all while we were in the various side rooms.

Everything from the graphics of the brochure to the custom designed chairs throughout the public areas carried the continuity of the building's form. The programming is rich and varied, and various design decisions to utilize cost effective and low-maintenance materials have allowed them to keep prices to a very miniumum - citizens of Porto can enjoy shows there for as low as five or ten euros!

Old Porto

We hopped in our bus and drove through old Porto, the city's traditional center, and down towards the Duoro, the river that runs along the city and ends in the Atlantic Ocean. Old Porto boasts stunning architecture and intricately detailed buildings. Most unique to Portugal is the prevalent use of azulejos, or painted tiles, to clad the buildings. Both modern and old buildings stand out with beautifully detailed tile work, sometimes with frescos, sometimes three-dimentional and sometimes with modern geometric patterns.

Compared to the pristinely restored Madrid, Porto has a very run-down feel about it. According to our tour guide, approximately 40,000 people have left their residences in Old Porto, and one can't help but feel a true sense of an abandoned city. The government is slowly buying up empty properties and restoring them to their previous glory in the hopes to see a resurgence in the residential market at the city's center. We saw many for sale signs hanging throughout the center on truly stunning properties, even employing some great marketing tactics like a naked mannequin to draw attention. I really can't imagine this gem of a city remaining so quiet and empty!

Boat Tour and Port Tasting

For the next leg of our tour we enjoyed the views back towards the city afforded from the city´s river, the Duoro. We went under the city's six bridges, one designed by the architect of the Eiffel Tower, and watched as the tightly packed apartments with laundry hanging outside gracefully floated by.

We got off on the other side and walked up the hill towards the Calem Port Wine lodge. No longer officially in Porto, all of the Port lodges are concentrated in an area called Gaia. We were given a tour and learned about the various types of port, the vintages, mixes, pink and white...then enjoyed a tasting. Sufficiently warmed up by our port, we headed back to the hotel to kickoff the conference.

Night in Porto


Since we were left to our own devices for dinner plans on our second night, the 'cool kids' (or so we fancied ourselves!) organized a big group dinner at a nearby restaurant. A group of about 20 Americans, Londoners, Israelis, Swedes and more, we were an eclectic crew. They seated us in a side room next to another large group dinner...and before we knew it we were being shuuuushhed from across the room.

In an instant, we found ourselves engaged in a full out war - it's a sing-off! We dazzled them with everything from Grease and 80's classics to a mystefying rendition of head, shoulders, knees and toes. And yes, the night definitely ended with both tables doing the conga through the restaurant- I'm still not sure how we accomplished it, but we had successfully created a wedding reception without either a bride or groom. Or a wedding DJ for that matter.

After a long Saturday of meetings which led straight into the closing dinner on a boat in the Duoro, a local designer from Madeira gathered us up and took us out for a night on the town in center Porto. We found ourselves on a lively one-block street called Rua da Galeria de Paris. It was lined with high-ceiling spaces repurposed into retail, restaurants and bars.

At midnight the street was already packed as people waited for restaurants to close dinner service and open to the bar crowd. Each spot was lovelier than the last, with all of the original columns and millwork in tact. We ended up at what was once an old bookstore, a great bar with a lounge area in front and a dancefloor in back. Sufficiently packed with friendly and hip locals, we danced the night away to a jukebox range of music with a strong leaning towards 90s music, chatted with the locals, and eventually made our way back to the hotel to collapse after a very full and long day.

I went to bed happy and fulfilled that night. It is weekends like these where I realize how blessed I really am and all of the opportunities my job has afforded me to see new places, meet a kaleidoscopic range of personalities, make real connections, and to enjoy some of the most random and pleasing moments I'd have never imagined or been able to plan.

Wandering on Sunday

Since my colleague and I had the advantage of being so close to home, we opted to take a later flight back on Sunday and did some casual exploration of Porto's most famous landmarks...we took a long walk through winding corners of Old Porto, visited the train station and the remarkable San Francisco cathedral, and ended our afternoon with a lovely lunch on the Duoro where I enjoyed one last Splash, my new favorite cocktail. Portugal's own version of the shandy or tinto de verano, a Splash is a tasty combination of tonic and dry white port. Fresh and slightly sweet, suffice it to say I'll be enjoying a lot of these this summer!


It is said that the Portuguese play in Lisbon and work in Porto. After a weekend in Porto, I can at the very least speak to the second half of that stereotype. Not an overtly electified city, Porto has a quiet confidence and easygoing spirit that is very warm while decidedly staid. The people exude an extreme friendliness and outgoing nature that I understand to be very common to the Portuguese in general, and I felt welcomed and unjudged in every exchange I had. Thanks to this little taste, I rather look forward to expanding of my adventures in Portugal.

Next up? Lisbon and Madeira are very high on my list!