It was finished in 1917 for working families, never built to last a hundred years. And yet it did. A short story about why we kept it instead of starting over.
The building was finished in 1917. The First World War was still on, and Portugal had joined the year before. Downtown Lisbon was on the edge of the city then — more market gardens than houses, more hill than street. It wasn't a fashionable part of town. It was where working families lived.
The building was put up for three of those families. One apartment per floor. The facade got azulejos — the ceramic tiles you see all over Lisbon — in a pattern the tilemaker probably used on a dozen other buildings that same year. The paint above them was hand-mixed. The windows were tall and narrow. Nothing about it was designed to last a century.
And yet here it is. A lot of Lisbon isn't. Whole streets have been knocked down and rebuilt over the last hundred years — first for the city expanding, then for tourism, most recently for short-lets. Downtown Lisbon mostly got left alone. Our corner kept its original facade because the city protects it now. The tiles are the same tiles. The paintwork has been refreshed but the colour is the one it started with.
Inside, we did the work you'd expect. New wiring. New plumbing. Modern kitchens and bathrooms. But the layout is the layout the building was built with. The ceilings are the ones the builders put in. The windows are still tall and narrow. Sit on the balcony and you're looking at the same street a working family looked at in 1917, waiting for the war to end.
We could have knocked it down. It would have been cheaper. The apartments would be larger and more efficient. But you'd lose the thing that guests keep writing to us about afterwards — the feeling that the place they slept in had a longer story than their trip. That's the part you can't build back.
By Angels Homes
