Christian Louboutin’s Colorful First Hotel

A few decades ago, Christian Louboutin was tooling around Portugal, and became so smitten with the beauty of the small town of Melides that he crashed his car and stayed. He moved his atelier there, then moved there, and in 2019 began working on a hotel. This April, guests can stay in Vermelho, the footwear savant’s first stab at a hospitality project, a collaboration with architect Madalena Caiado and operated by Marugal.

Thirteen ornate rooms, each hidden behind custom Baroque doors of hand-worked American ash with pewter and enamel handles but otherwise unique in their styling, gather around a garden by landscape designer Louis Benech. Custom tiles and ceramics clad floors and walls in riotous colors, as do extravagant hand-painted murals. After a massage in a suite of Luxor alabaster, lucky guests can repair to a green Indian Giada marble bar with silver paneling courtesy of ecclesiastical Sevillian metalsmiths, then dine on octopus salad and lamb chops with migas chimichurri at Xtian, the colorful restaurant. Indeed, the interiors boast Louboutin’s signature nervy use of color—including, of course, his favored red that gives the hotel its name.