Case studies
Selected properties under our care
Anonymised with the owners’ consent. The numbers are private. The stories are not. A short walk through four houses that represent, in different ways, the kind of work we take on.
Lisbon · Chiado
Pombalino apartment, a minute from Largo do Carmo
Two bedrooms, ninety-five square metres, fourth floor with a working elevator in a restored pombalino building. Bought in 2021, then a year of patient work with the conservation office. Long-let to executive families relocating to Lisbon for two and three-year postings. Zero voids since the first tenancy began.
This is the boring, compounding version of Portuguese real estate, which is to say the version that actually works. We kept the old mouldings, the wide plank floors, and the view toward Carmo. The rest we rebuilt around a family that reads in bed and cooks at home.
Lisbon · Príncipe Real
Third-floor apartment, quiet side of the neighbourhood
Three rooms reconfigured into two, with a proper kitchen where the corridor used to be. Acquired in 2022 from a family that had held it for forty years. We kept the tiles in the hallway and the original carpentry in the bedroom, and rebuilt the bathrooms around what they should have always been.
Now a short-term let under the current AL framework, but run like a small house rather than a listing. Repeat guests book the same week each year. We know their names, which is the point.
Algarve · Lagos
Hillside villa above Meia Praia
Three bedrooms, a hundred and sixty square metres under roof on a nine-hundred square metre plot, with a private pool and an unobstructed ocean view. Sourced for a Scandinavian family in 2022. Four months of work, most of it outdoors. A proper open kitchen where the old service corridor had been, a shaded dining terrace that now does more entertaining than the living room.
Runs as a premium seasonal rental from May to October, sits quiet the rest of the year for the family who bought it for the Easter week, the summer fortnight, and the occasional Christmas.
Porto · Cedofeita
Granite townhouse, split-stay configuration
Four storeys, two hundred and ten square metres, bought in 2023 in habitable but tired condition. A full structural and systems refit under the urban rehabilitation framework. Configured as a split-stay property: ground floor and first floor for the owners four months a year, top two floors as a separate rental with its own street entrance.
The kind of house that would have been divided into five flats a decade ago. We kept it as one building, the way the granite mason had intended.
Alentejo · Comporta
Whitewashed farmhouse, fifteen minutes from the beach
Three bedrooms, one hundred and thirty square metres on a two-hectare plot with an old pine grove and a simple kidney pool. Bought in 2023 from a family that had grown olives there for two generations. Months of patient work with a small local team: the roof re-tiled in terracotta sourced inside the county, the original lime plaster kept, the kitchen extended into what used to be the storeroom.
Not a rental. The owners use it six months a year, come and go, and wanted a house that would still look right in thirty years without anyone having to touch it.
How these houses behave
Quiet, cash-flow positive, held for years.
The houses we place tend not to be sold again within five years. They generate a small, steady return in their own right, and they ride out the cycles the way old Portuguese buildings have ridden out every cycle since the Marquês de Pombal drew up the grid. We are not in the business of flips. We are in the business of decade-long holds.
If one of these cases resembles what you have in mind — or suggests what you do not want — write to us.