Interested in Design? Check out the scene in Porto!

Our love affair with Porto started in 1999 It was love at first when we visited Porto for the first time back i 1999. That was when we started talking about settling in Portugal for the first time. Since then we have been back countless of times.’

You really can’t compare the Porto and Lisbon Street Art scenes. Where Lisbon has established itself as an international Street Art metropolis with permanent master pieces Porto has ‘grown’ opposite with hundreds of small, short-lived and mostly local pieces of art scattered around town in places you nevere expect. Street-Art-Hunting is the perfect way to get guided around in Porto

 

We still we love Porto

For many years Porto’s food scene was much more interesting compared to Lisbon’s – some say it still is. But in our opinion Porto still has a more interesting art and design scene compared to Lisbon’s. It is as if we always find all the young and interesting shops and designers we can’t find here in Lisbon… This morining I happened to fall over a story on Medium about Porto’s new / ‘old’ designers. The I realized that we haven’t been there for 5 months!!! We must change that soon. Thomas  

There’s so much more to Portugal than sunny city breaks, windsurfing and pasteis de nata washed down with a chilled glass of port.

Over the past decade, it’s been busy designing itself out of a major recession by reinvesting in heritage homeware brands that celebrate the country’s diverse artisanship and rich craft traditions.

Much of this is being driven by entrepreneurs in their forties, who were born post-dictatorship and, as a result, are international in outlook and keen to champion the “Made in Portugal” label on a world stage.

The nation’s slightly shabbier second city, Porto, is the design powerhouse. With a long tradition for furniture and textiles manufacturing, it has yet again become a hotbed for creativity.

Read Playship’s Abhi Ragh’s Why Porto is Portugal’s new design power house on Medium.  A short guide to the new Porto design scene.

  [caption id="attachment_35646" align="aligncenter" width="1631"] Georges Schweder and his business partner Ferdinand Claus could hardly have imagined that Claus Porto, the little soap and fragrance business they set up in 1887 in Porto, would, five generations later, still be tempting an appreciative clientele. From Wallpaper’s story 23 June [/caption]    

The only reason why our name is Tings Lisbon and not Tings Porto is because we love Lisbon more.

Lisbon is bigger, it’s not as provincial as Porto and our climate is much better. And with our location in Graca its the best hotel in Lisbon if you want to have easy access to the outside world. We’re only 10 € from countless destinations on this planet. And the bestof it all is our bonus: ‘bonus’. It only takes us 2:15 hrs by car to reach Porto 🙂  ]]>