Most hoteliers get TripAdvisor reviews. João Rodrigues gets letters. When we meet at Santa Clara 1728, his hotel in central Lisbon, he’s looking over a note transcribed by hand onto the sort of patterned, Japanese paper you save for people who really deserve it. The gist: following a stay at one of his properties, a family has started breakfasting together again. It has changed their relationship for the better and they want to say thank you. “I’m very close to my guests,” says Rodrigues, who is also an airline pilot.

 

That’s right: he is also an airline pilot. Rodrigues captains longhaul flights for tap, Portugal’s national carrier. He flies roughly four times a month on routes including Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco and Maputo. Becoming a kind of folk hero in the world of hospitality was a stroke of luck, a side effect of a family project. “It started off as an accident,” he says. “We have a weekend house, which became quite famous because of the architecture.”

 

This is Casas na Areia (‘houses on the sand’), located in a riverside nature reserve in the Comporta region, not far south of Lisbon. Renovated by the architect Manuel Aires Mateus, the thatched buildings — four houses in total — are a pristine echo of classic fisherman’s huts, at least from the outside. But what really enchanted the design community was the floor in the living areas, which is covered by a layer of sand. “The house is on some sand dunes,” says Rodrigues. “The floor is a natural connection between the interior and the exterior of the house. It makes you feel that the house is infinite, that there isn’t a limit to it.” In 2008, the project was presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture as part of a portfolio of Mateus’s work. It made 10 magazine covers across the world. Friends began asking if they could stay there, so he began offering it as a holiday rental.

 

A decade on, Rodrigues has worked with his friend Mateus on three further projects. Together with Casas na Areia these form Silent Living, a mini-brand defined, as the name suggests, by a certain tranquility, but more profoundly by a double identity, being at once little hotels and sites for the daily life of a real family. Although strictly speaking we are in the hotel Santa Clara 1728 (in an 18^th century building on an ornate and delightful market square) we are in fact sitting in a duplex apartment above the six guest rooms, an apartment in which Rodrigues, his wife and their five children actually live. Casa no Tempo, a renovated farmhouse in the Alentejo region, around an hour’s drive inland from Lisbon, once belonged to Rodrigues’s grandfather. And Cabanas no Rio, in Comporta not far from Casas na Areia, has its origins in the family’s own holiday rituals.

 

“The fisherman who used to knock on my door at 4.00 am and ask, ‘Hey João, you want to come and fish with me?’ was getting ill,” says Rodrigues. “He wanted to sell the cabanas and I said, ‘Of course I’ll buy them.’ In the first two years we used them as a day stop. We’d take some books, we painted them white inside, we had some chairs, and we would spend the afternoon on the pontoon. Then suddenly my wife said, ‘Oh, I’d love to be able to stay here tonight,’ but there wasn’t a bathroom or a bed or anything. We were with four children at the time. We were like, ‘Is it possible? We’ll try and make it happen.’”

 

These were two fisherman’s huts on the river Sado. Their renovation was informed, if I understand correctly, by the intangible nature of memory: the way in which a place can evoke a sense of familiarity even if there’s nothing about it that can be properly connected to one’s past. “It’s so small, a tiny little house, of two 12 m² huts, where people have to fit not only themselves but all their luggage,” he says. “They are made out of only one material, reused wood. They have this pontoon over the river, so there’s a very strong connection with the water. The idea is that when you get there, it doesn’t really feel special. It feels very natural because it’s as if it’s been part of your long-term memory, since you were a child and someone told you a story about fisherman’s cabins.”

 

Wind, sand and stars: Rodrigues flies people around the world and creates small places doused in memory, and sometimes — often — his guests will write to say it made a difference. He recalls another letter about an unexpected epiphany, this time thanks to the sandy floor. “This was maybe five years ago,” he says. “This German guy had stayed in Casas na Areia. He told me that when he goes on holiday with his family, he takes his laptop because he always needs to work, alone. He started working in the living area and noticed that the music was too loud, so he walked to the other side of the room to turn it down. As he was walking back, something about how difficult it is to walk on the sand made him slow down his pace. Suddenly he looked up, he saw his children out in the pool, and his wife. He said, ‘What am I doing in here with the laptop?’ Obviously, we had never designed the house and the sand with that objective,” he says. “It’s beautiful how it touches people.”