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Dinner at Penalva da Graca
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A busy day during the high season.
WE LOVE RIDING THE TRAM 28
Lisbon's popular Tram 28 is only 3 minutes from Tins Lisbon. Here is all you need to know.
Hospitality Meets Art: Our Unexpected Path at Tings Lisbon
Our Own Border Crossing
... inspired by Eli Benveniste.
I love to be asked, it is in itself inspiring - as when Thomas and Anette last Summer suggested that I show at their place in Lisbon, which is fabulous in so many unusual ways.
Eli Benveniste on Tripadvisor
When Eli Benveniste sent us her story below, Crossing Borders, to accompany her exhibition at Tings Lounge, it resonated deeply with us. Eli describes how her journey as an artist has meant moving between countries, cultures, and creative worlds—always searching, always learning. Reading her words made us reflect on our own path and how, in our own way, we’ve also been crossing borders, though not as artists ourselves.
In 2008, we left our business careers—and the hamster wheel—behind to create a life centered around the things we truly care about: music, food, design, gardening, people, and art. We decided to start a small hotel and use it as a platform for our passions. The first was in Kathmandu, and now we’re here in Lisbon (Kathmandu closed during Covid). These changes in our lives have definitely been about crossing borders—moving from our old corporate world to a new life focused on the things we love.
Our first encounter: Thomas & Annette with Eli Benveniste, Castelo de Vide, 10 July 2024.
We created Tings to carve out space and time for what matters most to us. Design came naturally when Annette started making mood boards for our rooms. The garden was conjured from a concrete foundation between old shacks—Annette’s creation again.
Tings Lounge was a given; from our days in Kathmandu, we knew the importance of a common space where travelers and locals can meet for drinks and food after a day out. But unlike Kathmandu, where ingredients were scarce, here in Lisbon we could finally create a kitchen around fish, meat, vegetables, and, of course, baking bread 🙂
Art is everything you don't have to do!
Brian Eno
But what about art?
Neither of us has any art skills. For us, art has always been something we’ve admired, not created. I’m reminded of Brian Eno’s definition: Art is everything that you don’t have to do. That idea resonates with us—art isn’t a necessity, but it’s what makes life richer and more meaningful.
Faith or Coincidence. Annette and Eli have met befor. That was back in the 80ies in Copenhagen. 40 years later they work together in Lisbon with Eli’s exhibition in Annette’s lounge.
With Tings, we’ve built a venue where artists can show their work, play music, share poetry, paint murals, exhibit sculptures, and host talks—reaching travelers from all over the world and people living here in Lisbon. We don’t take commission from sales, we cover the opening receptions, and we handle all the marketing and communication ourselves. The money we earn from running the hotel and lounge funds it all.
We still don’t have any art skills—but with Tings, we’ve found a way to be part of the process of curating and creating art. It’s our way of crossing borders—stepping into new worlds, learning from the artists we meet, and sharing their stories and visions with our guests.
Recently, when I read Eli Benveniste’s positive review of Tings on Tripadvisor, I realized for the first time that perhaps we have managed to accomplish something on the art scene here in Lisbon. It’s a quiet but meaningful recognition—and one that encourages us to keep crossing borders, together with artists whose lives and stories inspire us.
Thomas Tingstrup, Lisbon, July 2025.
Monday 14 July is last day
Crossing the border
... or how it all started.
Before Jorgen took this photo of me when working at his studio in Valdicastello, September 1984.
I wanted to become a sculptor and was told Pietrasanta was the right place to go.
So, in September 1984, I went together with my friend Kristine Suhr and met Jørgen Haugen Sørensen just outside the arched gate to Pietrasanta. I recognised him from a picture in a catalogue some friends had shown me and asked if he would help us find a place to work.
That same afternoon we were both set up at his workshop in Valdicastello, with a block of stone each.
Jørgen advised me to go to Barcelona instead of applying to the Danish art academy. This I did, the same winter, with a backpack full of recommended books. From Joyce, Proust and Strindberg to Tjekhov, Jacobsen, Virginia Woolf and Julia Barnes, just to name a few from a long list of classics. The books were fundamental in providing me with knowledge, another kind of education than I had originally planned.
I knew no one in Barcelona and did not speak the language either, but after six tough months I had found a place to live and another to work. It was in Barcelona I learned to be alone and found the necessary peace and concentration to get started. There I taught myself to model and to explore my own sculptural language.
Eli Benveniste was married to Jørgen Haugen Sørensen for a long time. In dk4’s A Witness to His Time she talks about his art and their shared life.
Jørgen came to Barcelona from time to time and made small, very precise models in the studio. I came to understand the meaning of monumentality when I saw how these models later became refined sculptures carved in granite.
It wasn’t like Jørgen taught me how to model, because he believed it was better for me to find my own way. When he came to see what I had done since last, I just got an encouraging excellent or just keep going; His only advice to me was to model organically and I followed this advice because it felt natural.
Life in Barcelona lasted for about 10 years until our building in Carrer Sant Pau was demolished, due to city planning in the late 90s. By then we already spent half of our time in Italy.
40 years after Working on The Crowd, 2024, Jorgens monumental bronze sculpture Mindet in Aarhus. It is a gift from Olav de Linde and a tribute to art in the cityscape.
Villa Simi became the base to where we returned from many travels. Each of us had a studio in the house, we had dogs and parrots and continued to live and work together until Jørgen died November 2021.
For the last 12 -15 years I have taught modelling in yearly workshops, mostly at Bornholm’s Art Museum, but also at my own studio in Italy. Teaching others helped me understand what I actually knew: Putting words together, like this little text, is to me the best way of thinking. Writing is to me a natural companion to making sculptures.
Eli Benveniste, July 2025, Portugal.
Monday 14 July is last day
Thrown Into the World is Eli Benveniste's second showing in Portugal.
In 2002 she had a major exhibition in Lisbon, at the Museu da Àgua – Reservatório da Patriarcal no jardim do Príncipe Real, showing reliefs in glass and sculptures in terracotta. The exhibition was supported by the Danish Embassy.
Eli Benviniste’s website
