The One Palácio da Anunciada

The One Palácio da Anunciada

The palace at Rua das Portas de Santo Antão 112-134, a few minutes' walk from Praça dos Restauradores and from Avenida da Liberdade, was built in 1533 as the town residence of the Counts of Ericeira, one of Lisbon's oldest noble families, and stood empty for decades before its restoration. It reopened in March 2019 with 83 rooms, the second hotel in the small The One collection run by H10 Hotels, the family-owned company founded in Barcelona in the early 1980s by Josep Espelt. Interiors are by the Chilean designer Jaime Beriestain, who set contemporary furniture and neutral upholstery against gilded and frescoed ceilings, marble staircases and floors original to the palace, restored rather than replaced. Each room carries a set of hand-painted ceramic pieces made exclusively for the hotel and archival images of the building's earlier life, and rooms start around 25 square metres with marble bathrooms and a Nespresso machine rather than a minibar stocked for show. The restaurant, Condes de Ericeira, named for the family who once lived here, serves Portuguese market cooking with a Mediterranean accent under a coffered ceiling of hand-painted frescoes; Boémio, the cocktail lounge, is kept for hotel guests only, and O Jardim, the wine bar, doubles as the breakfast room. Despacio Spa runs on Natura Bissé products, with a sauna and a heated indoor pool, while the rooftop pool and solarium, set above the gardens, look out over the tiled roofs of Baixa. What it feels like is a palace still doing palace things at city scale, a grand hall for breakfast, a marble stair for the walk up to bed, a garden view instead of a street one, without leaving the centre of Lisbon to get it. The hotel's fifth anniversary party in 2024 drew more than 400 guests into those same halls, which tells you something about the scale the building can absorb; this is not a six-suite hideaway where you'll recognise every other guest by the second night, it is a working hotel that fills its grand rooms with breakfast service, wedding parties and business travellers midweek, tourists at the weekend. You should not come if you want the quiet of a small boutique property or would rather not share a coffered ceiling with a wedding reception; the street outside is a tourist run of souvenir shops and a Hard Rock Cafe that undersells what is on the other side of the palace doors, and some guests have flagged the poolside tiles as slick when wet, not the kind of detail you'd want from a five-star restoration, but the view over the rooftops does most of the persuading anyway. You should come for the 1533 palace itself, intact enough that the frescoes and gilding are doing the talking rather than a designer's mood board, for a spa built around Natura Bissé rather than a generic house line, and for a location that puts Bairro Alto, Baixa and the Avenida within an easy walk of the same marble staircase the Counts of Ericeira once used. The short version: A 1533 palace off Praça dos Restauradores, restored by H10 Hotels and designer Jaime Beriestain into an 83-room hotel with a rooftop pool, a Natura Bissé spa and a restaurant named for the Counts of Ericeira, the noble family who once lived here.