A forty-eight-room boutique hotel in a listed Pombaline building in Lisbon's Baixa district — narrow floor plans, original tile walls, and a client who refused to compromise on finish quality. Here is how we got the specification right.
Lisbon's Baixa is the eighteenth-century grid of streets that the Marquis of Pombal rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake. The buildings are listed. The walls are load-bearing. The floor plans are not, by any rational modern standard, designed for bathrooms. The typical room in this building — a converted residential block that a Lisbon hotel group acquired in 2023 — had a bathroom allocation of 3.4 square metres. We have specified bathrooms in Riyadh at three times that size.
The brief from the client's interior designer was clear: the fittings should not look like they came from a manufacturer's catalogue. They should look like they were chosen because they were right for the room.
The Specification Challenge
The building's listed status meant no penetrations through the original tile walls. All pipework had to route through a single service riser per room, entering the bathroom from the ceiling or the floor — never horizontally through the wall. This ruled out the wall-hung basin format we would normally specify for a small bathroom, because the waste connection requires a horizontal pipe chase.
We specified a pedestal basin instead — specifically our 540 mm Sevilla model, which has a waste geometry that allows the trap to sit completely inside the pedestal column. Clean line, no visible pipework, one screw to the floor.
The Shower
The shower alcoves averaged 760 mm × 900 mm — a format that eliminates most thermostatic valve options because the minimum handle clearance to the alcove wall is typically 150 mm per side. We solved it with our surface-mounted thermostatic bar valve, which mounts on the end wall rather than the side wall, and our 200 mm ceiling-mounted head, which avoids the need for any wall-mounted arm. The plumber can enter and exit through the ceiling void.
The Finish
The client specified brushed brass throughout. We hold PVD brushed brass in stock for the shower and basin fittings. The towel rails — which we do not manufacture — were sourced from a Portuguese metalwork studio the interior designer had used previously, and we provided our fitting dimensions so they could match the thread specifications exactly.
Delivery and Installation
All forty-eight bathroom sets shipped in three consolidated containers from Xiamen to Lisbon in twelve weeks from specification lock. The installation was completed by a local plumbing contractor who had not previously installed our product; we provided a Portuguese-language installation guide and a two-day site visit from our European technical representative during the first three rooms.
The hotel opened in November 2025. We have not received a single warranty call. The general manager sent a photograph of the bathroom in Room 24 — the room the interior designer specified herself — with a note that said the fittings looked "as though they had always been there." That is the standard we are working toward.
