Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin It’s always a wonderful thing when a full-on renovation fully respects the roots of a historic edifice—be it hotel, museum, or modest private home—and doesn’t erase the past. While that’s certainly not always the case (talking to you, NYC), a recent major hotel project in Lisbon absolutely hit the sweet spot of rejuvenating the past and modernizing at the same time. Iconic rooftop sign at the Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon Credit: CHUTTERSNAP Sitting above the huge Marquis of Pombal Square at the top of swank and leafy Liberdade Avenue, and overlooking the stately 64-acre Eduardo VII Park as well, the Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon is an icon as the city’s first prominent Modernist structure.
But as the 1959 hotel hadn’t been worked on over its sixty-five years of existence—known originally simply as the Ritz, the property has been a part of Four Seasons since 1997—how easy it could have been to have just gutted it and started all over. We can be thankful that restraint prevailed over this structure that’s listed as a Public Interest Monument. You can step today into these ten stories that give off a Corbusian sense of scale and shape and feel like you entered that same era that gave us works like Park Avenue’s Seagram Building.
And that deep consideration of the past included honoring the property’s original renowned art collection (a post on the collection will follow). Right off the bat, the enorm.