Homecoming
Delicately weaving an intimate tale of childhood, fatherhood, and a time before one’s time, hotelier João maps his arrival at Silent Living with a steady pace and tender heart, amidst a hardening industry. He invites us in to stay, reconnect, observe. By respecting our everyday spaces, marking our daily movements and the passings of time, returning once again to the very ordinary, he shows us, the extraordinary can be realised.
Words below by João.
This all started more than one hundred years ago. It has always happened in my family. Let me tell you a little story about my great-grandparents:
My great-grandfather was an entrepreneur in a small village in northern Portugal. One day, he travelled to Germany to buy a turbine. He wanted to electrify their whole village. And when he returned, he began to sell the electricity and energy to all those in the village — and for anyone who could not afford it, he would offer it to them, because he thought it was very important to the region’s development. And so, he believed in the future. He thought: if I help people out, we will all grow together and it will make a difference.
My great-grandmother, she — well, they had a big house in the centre of the village close to the church — she had ten children, and she would open up the ground floor of their house to welcome anyone who was passing by, to stay, who was in need. In those days, people would walk for three, four, five days from one place to the other. She would look after them and their wounds, and all the people who worked with her in the big house would cook for these visitors as well. Then, when these people would be fit, she would let them go.
This is, in fact, hospitality. I think people forget that hospitality comes from the word “hospital.” You welcome people in need, you look after them, and whenever they are better they will follow their way. So whenever people speak to me about hospitality and want to talk about “the standards of hospitality!” I want to ask them, “What does hospitality mean for you?”
I appreciate that tourism is not just about hospitality, but then those that are not should assume themselves as another kind of tourism, and what they offer is a room with a view or a room that does not have a view, or something else — but this is not what we do.
In Portugal we have this concept, especially in older families: when someone comes to your house for the first time, you show them to all of the house — which, I know, is really strange! I have studied and done my training to become a pilot in Scotland and I have English friends — I have known them for 20 odd years — and always, when I go to their house, we either stay in the dining room or in the living room. Sometimes when I want to take my plate to the kitchen, they will say to me, “Oh, no, João, please! We do it.”
While in Portugal, when you come to someone’s house, whether you stay for the night or even just visit for dinner or a coffee, people will show you everything! They will guide you through the whole house: “And here is the kitchen, and here” — they open up the cupboards and they show you what they have inside — “then here is the fridge, if you want something just help yourself,” then they go into their rooms and bathrooms, they show you the view from the bathrooms, and the balcony, and — it’s a guided tour to all of the house!
“I began to understand that the house was a final destination. I thought that was beautiful.”
One day I tried to understand why they do this. Why do we, Portuguese, do this in our culture? I realised it is to make people feel at home. You want to show your friends how you live and to share this with them; you don’t want to hide anything from them. It’s this idea that whatever is mine is yours as well. If you feel like opening up another bottle of wine, you know where it is, you go to the fridge and you open it.
So what we do here, whenever new guests come to any of our houses, we present them to the whole team. We go into the kitchen and if the chef is there working we say, “This is David, he does this and this for breakfast,” and David may ask, “By the way do you have any food allergies?” And there in the kitchen is a conversation. Then we say, “This is Sokhemra. She is from Cambodia, and she does an incredible massage, and offers lots of positive energy as well. The first massage is always offered on the house so feel free to get to know her.” Then Nuno, “He drives our beautiful Rolls Royce from the ’70s. He will take you to the airport. He is part of the family as well.”
We want you to feel like you are staying with some friends. We respect people’s privacy and space, of course, but it’s done in a very natural way. We are always working around how not to do tourism, how not to make people feel like tourists. Instead, it’s based on this relationship of: How shall we welcome our guests? How can we connect with them? What are people’s needs?
When I sold my business incubation company in 2006, I thought that I hadn’t spent enough time with my children and family, that I ought to give something back. So my first choice was to do a weekend house. This weekend house is on the west coast, it’s Casas Na Areia, which became our first project.
There used to be some fishermen’s houses there, but they were in very bad states — in ruins, almost. It was constructed 40, 50 years ago. They were made of straw and had thatched roofs and sandy floors. People used to make fires in there. They would cook on the floor of these houses without a chimney, and the smoke would fill the house, purifying the straw and cleaning all the mosquitoes and little insects inside. I thought this was a very nice idea. There were 30 kilometres of desert beaches and wild coasts around, with no one there, and the location wasn’t much more than an hour from Lisbon. It could be a beautiful place to do this house. But we always tend to imagine things — well, I’m a dreamer, so I always imagine things in a beautiful way. When we finished the house, the children had to go to school everyday, they had their tests, their friends’ birthdays on weekends, their gymnastics… and suddenly! We were not using the house as much as I had foreseen.
At the same time, because Casas Na Areia had been designed by an architect friend of mine, Manuel Aires Mateus, it was chosen to represent Portugal at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2008. Why? Probably because it was a very unpredictable house in that it has this sand floor and you sit in the middle of nature, and end up mixing the exterior and interior of the house. There were about ten international magazines that published the house on their covers. It was then that I realised that the house was a major success! I thought, Hang on. We don’t use the house that much. I already have lots of friends whom I lend the house to, and friends of friends are borrowing the house, so I said, “Hey, come on. This is a little bit too much, let’s organise this.” So my friend did some beautiful architectural pictures, we created a simple website, and we started welcoming guests. I began to do nearly everything myself, from welcoming guests to answering emails, to managing the reservations, to charging them. I also had a cleaning lady there who used to prepare breakfasts for them everyday. And that was it! That’s how it started. Very quickly, I released this is really what I love to do! It caught my attention.
We had some guests stay in the house for ten days and I told them everything they could do in the area, because it’s beautiful — you can go to the beach, you can watch the dolphins, you can ride horses on the beach, you can visit vineyards. There are so many things to do. But when I asked them, “How were your ten days? Tell me a little bit — what did you do?” They said to me, “João, we just stayed at home. All we wanted was to stay here and to disconnect, recharge, read some books, and recover our interactions between our family.”
I began to understand that the house was a final destination. It’s not that you want to visit Comporta, and then you look for a house to stay there — no, people were coming for the house! To stay in the house! I thought that was beautiful. I thought, If we did it once, let’s do it again.
It came up as a surprise, Cabanas No Rio, the small cabins close to the water with the pontoon. Initially I thought it was going to be a day-stop, not even to sleep there. We had painted the cabins in white. I used to go there with Andreia and the kids to swim for a bit in the river, to go kayaking. They had a few chairs inside, a collection of books. That was it. We would spend an afternoon there.
The cabins had belonged to a fisherman before I bought them. He was my neighbour, a few houses away, and he would come and knock at my window at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning and say, “João, do you want to come fishing with me?” So we would go. We would go on the boat and throw nets in, and just chat for two to three hours before collecting back the nets.
Then one day, he asked me to buy his cabins because he was sick. He had a disease and he wouldn’t be able to fish anymore so it could be a good help if I could buy the cabins from him. I said, “Well, I love the cabins and I love being here” — I didn’t know what I was going to do with the cabins at that time, but he had said to me, “You are the only person I trust to sell the cabins to.” So I said, “Okay. I will buy the cabins from you.”
I ended up buying the boat as well! Although I had never fished on my own. And our family gave the buildings a new use.
One day, one of the children said to me, “Dad, can we stay the night here?”
“No,” I said. “We don’t have a toilet. We don’t have a place to sleep. No mattress.”
I remember exactly, that day, driving back, they were all sleeping in the car and I was driving along, heading to Lisbon, back home. I kept thinking: How would it be possible to make this dream come true? How could we sleep at the cabins? How could we spend the night? So I decided to call the architect. I asked him, “Manuel, how could we spend the night here? What would we have to do? Let’s rethink this.”
We decided that one of the cabins should be a room with a bathroom and the other should be a small sitting area with a kitchen, each of them independent. The buildings are the same size they used to be, although they are slightly taller to make it possible for you to walk inside. We also gave them a slightly different geometry — one of the things I had passed on to Manuel was this idea of, whenever you are in your own room you want to feel cosy, protected, hidden, while when you are in a sitting area you want to feel exposed to the exterior and that the landscape invades you, that you can be part of the landscape as well. He did this in a beautiful way with the shapes of the cabins. In one, the peak of the roof is right at the back, and in the other, it is right at the front near the door — so one opens up and you feel kind of expelled to the outside, while the other tends to close and you feel protected.
“All of these little things should make you feel well because they are a part of your long-term memory.”
To be exposed to the changes, to hear the noises in the morning, to listen to the tide going up and down through the day, the birds, the wind. You begin to feel that you are in the middle of nature just wearing a raincoat, nothing else. How beautiful this is — almost feeling naked outside. Having these kinds of unfolding moments when, suddenly, you understand, It doesn’t matter if I have a wardrobe or not. I just need the clothes that I’m using. There’s no one here to look at me, it’s just me and my loved one, or me and the world, me and the planet.
A couple from Belgium who often stays in the cabins, and who really can travel to and stay anywhere in the world that they want! They wrote to me saying the cabins are ‘still the best holidays’ for them and how they always want to go there. With this feedback from our guests who are staying in the houses, I see how places can touch people’s lives and how I want to continue on doing this, even if in a small space, on a small scale. If we can have another family to look after and to just allow them to be in a beautiful space, in the middle of nature, interacting with it.
Only when you experience these moments of beauty do you know that things could be different.
We have written our core recipe very carefully. There are eight ingredients that are part of this recipe, and one of them which I love to talk about is memory.
When you arrive to the cabins close to the river, you realise they are actually quite normal. They don’t have anything special, so you don’t lose time in looking at them because it’s like they have always been there. Not only because they were a pre-existing ruin but because all of the materials we chose and the way we have done them is the way you, as a child, would have listened to a story told by a grandmother about this fisherman who used to live in a fisherman’s cabin and who would go fishing everyday. The Cabanas are made of wood — and you have already imagined that — and this wood has been burned by the sun, these cabins have only a door that you can slam and close, there is this very strong connection to the river and water, and this boat close to the pontoon. All of this is sitting there. So all these little things should make you feel well because they are a part of your long-term memory.
We are not doing anything new, I don’t want to invent anything. All I am doing is: Let’s do it right. It’s these very tiny interactions between choosing the place, designing the house, choosing the materials, and looking after people that makes it magical. Makes it special.
We opened Santa Clara here in Lisbon three years ago. One day I was chatting with my team about how important the different smells are, in the house. When you arrive in the afternoon and there is this smell of a cake being baked, and it makes you remember the afternoons you would spend at your grandmother’s house after school, or whatever it may be, and it all falls in and gives you this beautiful sensation. We were talking about this and what we could do. Then a week later, I am running down the stairs to come for a meeting and I see José already on the first floor. He is with his pan, like this, slowly moving the pan.
I go, “Hey! José! What are you doing here with this pan in the middle of the stairs?”
He says, “You know what, João, it’s almost 10 o’clock in the morning. It’s very strange? There’s no one downstairs yet for breakfast? I’m just waking them up with the smell, you know?” He was doing this strawberry jam that morning, which had this beautiful smell, and here he was spreading the smell around the house so that people could feel the smell and could wake up, and maybe be driven to breakfast!
“José,” I said. “You’re really special. Come on, let’s give a hug.”
“Only when you experience these moments of beauty do you know that things could be different.”
We have also come to realise that routines are very important in people’s lives. This isn’t something that came up just now, with the quarantine — we have been talking about this for more than two years! We feel that many people have lost some of the very basic family routines in their daily lives. So when guests stay with us, we try to bring those routines back and to mark those routines very well. We never tell them this! It’s very subtle and they have to perceive it. Some understand it one way, others understand it another way.
When I talk about routines, I talk about stretching yourself in bed when you wake up, opening the windows and letting the fresh air come in, pulling the bedsheets back, seeing yourself for the first time in the mirror that day. Leaving your room to the smell of breakfast being prepared, coming down and sitting at this long, communal table and sharing breakfast with other people — and really spending an hour at breakfast, instead of 15 minutes grabbing somethings and just walking out. I feel that everything we do should be done with a compass. There should be a rhythm to everything. So, if it’s to write a letter, okay, let’s give them the most beautiful desk, the most beautiful paper, a really nice pen with which they will like to write, and the correct light. Let’s work on it. If it’s about breakfast, let’s work on the breakfast. If it’s going into the garden, let’s make it special as well. All things, everything. Giving attention to these small details.
The people who work with me, when they are more okay with me and there is a very open relationship, if they have to point out one thing, they will probably point out the same thing. Which is: “João, you are never happy with anything.” And I always tell them, “Yes! That’s how I feel!”
“We’ve done it this way and now you want to do it another way?”
“I think so, yes, because now I’ve discovered an even better way to do it.”
Probably, it has a little to do with perfectionism, but it also has to do with this will of making other people happy.
Whenever I come up with an idea, I say, “I want to meet up in three days and I want to discuss (this).” So we go and everyone has the same vote. We all have one vote independently, whether it’s the third row in the kitchen or if it’s me, we all vote the same way. We just have to put our ideas out, to express them and our beliefs, and usually we get to a conclusion. After getting to that conclusion, generally it’s been very easy to put it into practice because that conclusion came from a good argument, from a good discussion. It’s never: “João now wants for everyone to do (this).” Instead, everybody understands it. I think that’s very important. We do it in a very collective way.
We often ask guests if they can give us one suggestion, even if they don’t write it down, if it’s informal — verbally. We always say in our team, “It’s not a rule! Let’s try to implement it. If it works, let’s improve it. If it doesn’t work, let’s forget it about!” So whenever a guest leaves a suggestion for us, we always discuss it and, depending on what the suggestion is, I create a small team around me to work on the suggestions. We implement, we take pictures, we adjust. Then, I write back to our guests saying, “Thanks to your suggestion, we are now serving breakfast in the garden. People who come and stay with us are loving it. Thank you. Next time you come back, you will be able to have your breakfast in the garden as well.” — Or whatever it may be. The impact has been incredible because people are not used to it, to having someone do what they have suggested! They write back saying, “João, this is incredible! How can you do this? How can you answer me with all that you have to do?” For me, it’s because it’s around people, so that’s all that we have to do. They are our guests, people who are invited to sit at the table, friends, so it’s always this. It’s always with the people in the centre of the equation that you solve these things. And everyday is different, and every guest we host is different, so it’s the chance of welcoming one more. And one more, and one more.
We are the size of a small lab in which we can try things out. If you are talking about The Ritz or Four Seasons, it would be difficult for them to implement a strategy like this because it would be a huge risk if it didn’t work. But it doesn’t have a huge, negative impact on us. We have this good thing; we are smaller.
My grandparents used to celebrate their birthday together on the same day, because their birthdates were just one day apart from each other. Always, they would host a party in the middle of those two dates and invite everyone to their house. The gardener who used to work there with his family, he would sit just across from a president of the bank, who would sit next to my grandfather, across from the Minister of Defence. They would all sit at the same table, chat along, and feel exactly the same. This has always inspired me. Whether it’s the carpenter or the president or the CEO of a big company, I never had this barrier of who I should or should not talk to.
A friend of mine, well, the way I got to know him was: one day I was watching one of the people here who cleans the roads, (some of them come only with a broom). I stopped my car and I was looking at how he was cleaning the road. He wouldn’t leave one tiny leaf behind! It was almost as if he was cleaning his house, in such a beautiful way. And his uniform was all very clean, his broom was the most beautiful one, and you speak to him and, suddenly, you understand that he feels so happy and so proud of what he is doing. Cleaning the roads for other people.
On the other hand, I am friends with CEOs of large companies and they often say to me, “I have the worst job in the world. This is horrible, I hate this. I have to do (this), then I have a meeting, then I have to do (this)…” — so it’s really not what you do, but how you do it. It’s not even about how much you earn — obviously, you should earn for what you do, to compensate what you do, that’s very important because it’s one of the ways to recognise your work and your effort, but — it’s much more than that. Love and happiness come from completing little tasks very well. If you do this, you will feel happy on your own. You are the sunshine! And you don’t need anyone else to tell you, “You are great at this guest relations. You really did incredible work looking after these people during their stay.” Because you know what you do and you feel it. You look into guests’ eyes, their smiles and faces, and that tells you everything. It’s about passion. Doing things well and looking after others, with this heart in the right place.
When we recruit, generally these people come from a tourism background and they arrive with many preconceived ideas — and that’s one of the first things I have to do: to wash their brains! I think if, instead of having people from hospitality, we had nurses here working with us, it would work just as well. It’s very interesting because when someone new comes into the team who doesn’t really fit, generally he or she will ask to leave and I don't need to send them away. I think it’s because other people are already more or less tuned-in to this philosophy, and they love what they do. They enjoy looking after the guests in a very natural way, so it’s either a natural fit or it’s not — either they love this concept and they really gather into this, or it never fits. It’s a difficult business to run because it’s a business with people, for people.
We have had very professional people here with a lot of experience in tourism, but it just doesn’t fit because when they go to the door and say goodbye to the guests, they want them to go! While we want them to come back and we are already sad that they are leaving. And this very difficult to scale. You can’t. This is something that has a specific size. This is why all of our houses never have more than four to six rooms — they all have to keep this size otherwise we will lose it. And I have to be very strict with this, to always keep on this path and never lose track. I can’t look at a huge, beautiful building and say, “Now I’m going to do a 50-room hotel.” And this can be difficult.
“It’s this idea that you lay down and you feel that you couldn’t have done better for your day than you did. And it’s so very comfortable. It’s so good.”
There are other things I find very hard in our business. Looking after my team and keeping them motivated and cherished; that’s almost all that I do now. Keeping maintenance in place. For example, there is a door that has been damaged, but we are not going to call in the carpenter just to fix a tiny thing on the door. Okay, but then it doesn’t look perfect. What shall we do now? I think if we can have another two to three houses, then we will have the chance for someone to work just for us and to look after the houses as you would look after a little baby. That would be great. But until then, it’s difficult.
Another important one to talk about is consistency, which unfortunately we still don’t have. Almost a year ago already, this has been one of my aims. It is difficult because you can only do it with lots of training and by being close to people, but when you have to go on a flight and you are away for four or five days, when you return a lot of the things are already gone. So you really need to have responsible people in what they do. They must know that it doesn’t have to do with just pleasing others. It’s about truly connecting in a more profound way, about this very thin and fragile connection with people. It’s based on the guests’ experiences and deeply touching their hearts. It’s based on this passion for welcoming others. If this can be the case, then everyone in the team will feel very happy.
I think we have found this track, this way of thinking, choosing, designing. It all has to be very local. The materials should never be more than half an hour away from the house. Hopefully, it always values craftsmanships. Hopefully, it’s done by local people. Hopefully, those people who are interacting with our guests are people who have this genuine feeling about welcoming others. That’s why the service is completely different in each of our houses. For example here in Lisbon, the breakfast takes an hour. It’s super detailed with many different things, they’re cutting the bread in front of you, everything has been designed. While in the farm house, it’s a farm breakfast. If you go to the house close to the sea, it’s a kind of a beach breakfast. All the houses have been designed to be where they are. You can’t transport a house from the south of France and deposit it here, because that house speaks about that area, about that region, about that people.
I often get asked, “Who are your competitors?” They ask me if I worry about others copying what we do, and I look at it and… I don’t know. Obviously there are competitors, but I think even if they try to copy what we do, if it doesn’t come from the inside, they are not having any luck! It wouldn’t work because that’s not the way to do it. But people try. Some of them try just through the aesthetics; they come and look at our bathrooms and say, “Oh! Now I understood it’s all about the bathrooms! It’s all about having stone bathtubs in the bathrooms,” and they go and design a new hotel with 60 rooms, all with stone bathtubs, but it doesn’t work and they don’t understand why.
Often times, I feel that other hoteliers want to come closer, to try and drink from these ideas. Always I tell them that I’m not afraid of sharing what we do with them because when you are able to innovate once, you are able to innovate a hundred times. And what I really want is, hopefully, to inspire the whole of tourism across the world! To do it in a better way. I want people — when they travel, when they come into other countries — to love that experience. That’s why we really need this crisis to leave us in peace! So that we can continue on welcoming families.
My father, the way he taught me is if someone is going to come over, we are going to give them the best fish that we have, and we are going to give them the best wine, and it really has to be cold, and fresh, and the temperature has to be just right. You don’t want to get rid of that bottle of wine you don’t really like, so they can drink it. No, it’s the other way around! It’s this genuine way of knowing that our happiness comes from making other people happy, and all the beauty around it. That’s it. There’s nothing much to it.
Yesterday we were having a chat in our team, (because even now during this pandemic we are having a chat at the end of each day for an hour), and we always choose a brainstorming idea. It was brought up yesterday to talk about revenue. I waited for the conversation to start but, halfway through, I felt I had to say, “Hey, it doesn’t really have to do with the revenue. It has to do with, How can we improve? and How can we make people feel well?” For example, we always offer a massage when people stay with us. It’s a beautiful massage. It’s a full one-hour with, really, one of the best therapists I have ever met in my life. So I was telling them, “When we offer, we have to offer the best that we have! Let’s offer something that we would like for ourselves as well. Let’s not offer a 10-minute foot massage instead, because that’s not the point…” Numbers have to match up, projects must be rewarded, investments as well — everything has to be stable — but my main point is not revenue. If you do it well, the revenue will be there. More than focusing on the result, focus on the process.
The other day, we had a meeting around how we should treat our guests — shall we address them by “Mister (his last name)” or shall we treat them by “Beverly” or “Mark”? It was quite an interesting discussion! We ended up doing it as we already do it, which is the most natural way: to treat people by their first name. It doesn’t have to do with showing respect because you show respect and you earn their trust if you do things well — if you look after them as they were your best friends in town and they were coming for the first time; when you answer their emails, it’s as if you are answering an email to a good friend of yours.
Because most of them are younger, in their 20s, and I have had nearly twice the life experience and time to learn — I should have learned a little bit more! (although I’m a slow learner, but) — what I always try to pass on to them is that our most simple happiness comes from doing simple tasks well. By doing those simple tasks well, we will feel accomplished. It’s this idea that you lay down and you feel that you couldn’t have done better for your day than you did. And it’s so very comfortable. It’s so good. It’s beautiful.
We have an English couple who have stayed in Santa Clara 18 times, even though they already have an apartment in Lisbon. They explained to me, “Our apartment is just for the children because they’re already older, and for our friends who want to visit, but when we go to Lisbon we want to stay in Santa Clara.”
“But why?” I ask them. “Why do you keep coming back?”
“We like to treat ourselves well,” they say.
And it’s beautiful because, now, the husband likes to collect everything at breakfast himself. He prepares a little tray and he wants to be the one to take it to their bedroom to his wife. All of these things. These people who make it special. This genuine way of connecting with others. We are very glad, very lucky, because most of our guests connect with the Silent Living concepts.
I had some guests write to me on Japanese paper after staying with us. They said: “João, I wanted to write and I chose this Japanese paper because our stay was so special, and everything was so delicate, as delicate as me choosing this paper to write on,” and they talk about very simple things that have happened in the house.
I have had families go back home and say, “João, for the first time we are having family breakfast everyday, every morning. We wake up half an hour earlier so that we can all sit at the table.” And when I read this, oh, it really makes me cry, because that is when I understand that these really simple moments touch people’s lives and hopefully bring them back to what should have always been.
Favourite way to start the day: In nature.
Greatest extravagance: Going for a walk in the farm and coming back home after sunset.
A book I most enjoyed recently: Atmospheres from Peter Zumthor.
Favourite time of year and why: Spring, the days start to be longer and nature is green.
Silent Living is a growing collection of guest houses based in Portugal: Casas Na Areia and Cabanas No Rio in Alcácer do Sal, which began as family weekend houses by the sea; Casa No Tempo in Montemor-o-Novo, a farming estate entrusted to João’s family in his grandfather’s will; and Santa Clara 1728 in Lisboa, in the city’s old cultural quarter and where João and his family reside on the top floors.
João says: “I learn every day from this beautiful project and from our guests, just by listening to how they feel in the house and observing their behaviour in the space. Space changes our behaviour and even the way we look at the world. Beauty changes people and the way they behave. When we had lots of guests arriving, we began to collect words that were close to them. One of their first words was Silence. They felt the silence in the space. That’s why we called our projects Silent Living.”
Published on: 11 May 2020. Edited by Fields in Fields. All images courtesy of Silent Living, with a selection of Casas Na Areia by Renée Rae, Cabanas No Rio by Tim Reed, and Santa Clara 1728 by Renée Kemps and Rich Stapleton. ■ For bookings and enquiries, contact: booking@silentliving.pt or +351 964 362 816 (also available by Whatsapp), or visit: silentliving.pt