Accent on Living

THE superlatives applied by our various friends to the Hotel Aviz in Lisbon did indeed lead us to expect great things of it. Such language as “ the best of them all,” “finest in the world,” “ in a class by itself” — these are not findings frequently heard from the returned traveler, and there were enough of them laid down for the Aviz to excite one’s curiosity. Not the least of the incentives to see for one’s self was the inability of all hands to say just what made the Aviz so irresistible. “All I can tell you is that it is something very special in the way of hotels,” a friend wrote me, “and I know you will agree.” Others were just as vague. No, it wasn’t especially the food, although the restaurant was superb, nor the rooms, nor any particular way of doing things. We should have to see the place, and then it would become clear.

My wife and I decided to invest our first two nights on the Continent in the Aviz, and it all proved to be true: an extraordinarily subtle, complicated, and civilized environment, like that of no other hotel that we had ever experienced. It was probably a mistake to begin a European sojourn with the Aviz, for it made the hotels that followed seem alike and relatively uninteresting, but there was no way of fitting Portugal into our itinerary except by making it our first stop, and so it was that we drove up to the Aviz’s door one August Sunday morning. We were tired by the overnight flight from Boston, annoyed by P.A.A.’s mislaying of some luggage, but the respect in the taxi driver’s voice was noteworthy. “ And here,” he said as we turned into the short driveway, “the Hotel Aviz.”

Externally, the Aviz looks like what it originally was: a spacious and luxurious town house, the former home of some Lisbon plutocrat. Its grounds are more or less concealed by flowers and profusely blossoming vines, surrounded by a high fence of iron palings. The house is more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, and its effect of reaching into the heights is enhanced by its location on a rocky elevation in the highest part of the grounds. The architecture seemed indeterminate to me, but I was impressed by a long, broad chimney, which dominated the front and on which a huge heraldic eagle was depicted in a pattern of blue bricks. The Aviz is not large, containing only some twenty-five to thirty rooms and suites in all, units of occupancy that accommodate not more than fifty to sixty guests. I should judge it to be the smallest hotel anywhere to possess anything like its distinguished reputation. The whole building was all but covered by a vast bougainvillaea vine in full bloom, with great cascades of purple blossoms plunging from roof to garden.

From the point of arrival in the great hall of the Aviz to one’s departure, it is hard to identify precisely the peculiar charm of the hotel. I was hardly expecting an ordinary Continental breakfast to provide so much satisfaction, but here, as in all else, was a perfection, an elegance, that seemed to endow commonplace occasions with a special attraction. A breakfast at the Aviz, in short, was the model of what a tray should look like, of the flower-bordered tall window where a table should be set, of the instant service that a bell push should bring from the kitchen on each floor.

One was bound to notice the linen of the Aviz, the profusion and the sumptuous quality of its hemstitching, its monogramming, but what seemed to typify the place was a table in the bathroom. The table bore a gay bouquet of pink carnations, the vase resting on a crisp doily on which I solicited my wife’s expert opinion. “A very pretty bit of handwork,” she said, “ a really fine linen with country lace.” There were, of course, flowers everywhere, with handsome arrangements in the bedroom and, on a large scale, in all the public rooms. But these details, I realize, are simply items: good to find in any hotel, even better in so lavish a combination as the Aviz offers, but still insufficient to create that sense of uniqueness that makes the Aviz so exciting. To describe its rooms in more detail will not do it, either, and some of the wild colors of its décor would simply sound garish. I found myself gaping at the enormous square rug which dominates the great hall, a modern example in large, bold patterns mainly in chocolate brown, bright yellow, blue, and in many lesser color effects, yet the net of it all is an air of luxury and a singular appropriateness.

The elevator of the Aviz, one of the first bits of the hotel’s apparatus to be encountered by the stranger, may very well be what originates the air of distinction; at any rate, it is quite the most attractive and unexpected version of an elevator that I have seen. The car is the body of a remodeled coach, small, elegant, and dating, I should judge, from the first half of the nineteenth century. The interior is richly upholstered in a dark maroon, with a diamondshaped pattern in gilt, but the elevator’s great feature is its window curtains — crisply starched and very sheer voile in an unabashed lilac color. It comes home to the visitor immediately that this is his first elevator with curtains of lilac voile, and this alerts him to begin gathering his impressions.

In my own case, I decided — on the basis of the elevator — that the Aviz was a law unto itself. It was trying to imitate nothing, nor was it even seeking to represent the faded elegance of Portugal. There were huge, mysterious examples of old furniture and cabinetwork that looked like important antiquities, yet these, impressive though they were intrinsically, seemed carelessly, almost artlessly, scattered through the principal rooms. But if the furnishings seemed casually intended, nothing could have been more rigidly conventional than the attire of the staff: a beautifully tailored slategray livery with black and silver details for the downstairs staff, and several changes, as the day wore on, for the floor service waiter and maid, who came to seem like characters in an extremely well-costumed play by the time I saw the maid’s 6 p.m. cap — a round, fluted bit of linen that looked like an overturned baking dish. The page boys at the Aviz were just as well fitted as their elders, and, unlike many other establishments employing them, the Aviz saw to it that no boy was growing into or out of the livery of his predecessor. These slate-gray frock coats were worth looking at. A casual inquiry at the desk, incidentally, brought me the news that the staff of the Aviz numbers one hundred thirty-four, which I am sure is a record for a hotel of its size.

So there it is, no more evident than it was as to why such luster should surround the name of this small hotel. The Aviz is not even old, in the traditional sense, having been founded in the early thirties. In a city attracting only a small part of the flow of travel, entirely without stunts or freakish blandishments the Aviz has convinced many travelers that it is the best of them all. This is an opinion to which I subscribe with great earnestness.