Sublime Lisboa

Sublime Lisboa's white front curves round a corner in Amoreiras, with a grey awning over its black door, and the 20th-century townhouse behind it has kept its period bones: a staircase sweeping up behind a white iron balustrade, and panelling on the walls. The colour went in over them. The lounge is burnt orange to the ceiling, with lit shelves of coral and art books behind a long curved sofa. One bedroom has a red headboard and, on a cushion, an elephant. No two of the fifteen rooms are alike, and the old floor plan makes some of them smallish, though the largest suites reach 56 square metres. The Sublime Suites have a terrace or balcony over the red roofs, and two of the three Pateo rooms a courtyard of their own, for anyone who would rather have outdoors than floor space.

Recommended for couples who want central Lisbon on foot and somewhere quieter to come back to, and for families, since Club7, a short walk away, has what the townhouse does not: a kids' club and a 25-metre pool, with tennis and padel besides. The hotel is away from the Bairro Alto crowds, yet the Baixa is fifteen minutes' walk, and the Gulbenkian twenty by way of Parque Eduardo VII, two blocks from the door. Dinner is at Davvero, where Isaac Kumi, a Cipriani veteran, cooks no-frills Italian region by region, at white-clothed tables under a rattan ceiling. On the cream panelling hangs a large photograph of a man in a hat with his back to the room, the one person in there not looking at dinner.