B28 Apartments Porto | Boutique Stay in the Jewish Quarter

Sunlit living room at B28 Apartments Porto with a vintage Scandinavian leather chair, original carved-wood panelled doors and a balcony over the old Jewish quarter.| The Aficionados

Intro

In the heart of Porto's UNESCO-listed historic centre, on a quietly characterful street in the city's medieval Jewish quarter, B28 Apartments are seven serviced design apartments threaded into a sixteenth-century bourgeois townhouse on Rua de Belomonte. The building is one of Porto's quiet marvels: two entrances, almost six centuries of layered history surrounds and a six-year restoration in the hands of architect José Bernardo Távora. Conceived by Porto-born Alida Jamal as more a rather chic contemporary home with a heritage twist, B28 sits on the precise hinge between Belomonte and the old Synagogue Stairs of Porto, contemporary comfort folded quietly into ancestral fabric.

No Facadism

The restored 19th-century spiral staircase at B28 Apartments Porto, looking down through five floors with turned white balusters and a mahogany handrail. | The Aficionados

Pigeons in flight above Rua de Belomonte in the heart of Porto's old Jewish quarter, framed by the patinated façades of the historic centre.

Construction at Rua de Belomonte 28 began in the sixteenth century; the building was substantially extended and reshaped in the nineteenth. What survives is a textbook Porto bourgeois townhouse: five storeys above the ground floor, narrow in plan, granite in bone, with two front doors. The main entrance opens onto Belomonte itself; a second, three floors up, gives onto the Escadas da Vitória, formerly the Escadas da Esnoga, the Synagogue Stairs of the medieval Judiaria Nova do Olival.

The rehabilitation was led by architect José Bernardo Távora, son of Fernando Távora and an heir to the Porto School lineage that produced Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. The brief was conservation, not facadism, a position Alida Jamal has been outspoken about. The sixteenth-century stone arches stayed. The inner patio stayed. The operatic nineteenth-century spiral staircase was returned to its original brightness, crowned by the restored lanternim skylight that pours daylight down through the building's vertical core in classic Porto bourgeois fashion. Originality reigns with the building's ancestral character left visibly intact.

Stucco, Shutters & Mid-century soul

Principal-floor bedroom at B28 Apartments Porto with elaborate 19th-century stucco ceiling and three tall French doors opening to wrought-iron balconies.| The Aficionados

Inside the seven apartments, Alida Jamal has designed a minimalist envelope that lets the building's own ornament do the talking. The palette is restrained: sage, buttermilk and chalk, the off-whites that catch the light. Pale plank wood floors run throughout, layered with woven sisal rugs. The philosophy is openly Mies-quoting (less is more).

The building's two architectural personalities sit one on top of the other and the interiors honour both. On the principal floors, the nineteenth-century bourgeois inheritance has been brought back to its full bright theatricality: elaborate plasterwork ceilings with central rosettes of acanthus leaves and geometric mouldings; tall carved-wood panelled doors and panelled internal shutters; French windows opening onto Porto's signature sage-green wrought-iron balconies and views of azulejo-tiled façades across the street. Sheer linen curtains soften the daylight; the original stucco does the work that elaborate lighting design would do in a lesser building. On the upper floors, the original carpentry is revealed and whitewashed: pitched timber roofs with their rafters, king-posts and beams left honestly visible, dormer windows framing Porto's red-tiled skyline.

Furniture is largely Portuguese and mid-century: dark-rosewood dining tables, black-leather chairs of quiet authority, sage-green linen sofas, woven-cane benches, the occasional vintage Scandinavian leather lounger pulled up to a balcony. Kitchenettes are minimal and white-on-white, with integrated appliances and a single wood-grain dining table to pull the eye back towards craft. Pale terracotta and blush throws warm the edges. The whole composition is deliberately quiet, the kind of room that finishes a sentence with a comma rather than a full stop.

The single design touch Alida cites first hangs on every wall. The photographs displayed throughout B28 are by Luís Ferreira Alves, the Porto School's documentary photographer of record and a longtime collaborator with Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. They were originally commissioned to record the six-year restoration, frame by frame, in the conventional way; as the apartments came together, Alida decided to keep them and hang them throughout the building as its own visual archive. In the principal bedroom, two large-scale colour images sit above a simple wood bench: the building stripped back to bare timber, raw plaster and the architect's ladders, the moment before the project began to come together. The work on the walls of B28, in other words, is B28 itself, in the act of being remade.

Apartments range from studios to a two-bedroom Upper Deluxe on the top floor with sweeping city and river views over Porto's historic centre.

Organic breakfast bags arrive at each apartment door every morning.

A Rua by Friars & The Old Jewish Quarters

Rua de Belomonte is one of Porto's most quietly authentic streets. Laid out by Dominican friars and named in the sixteenth century, it threads through the old town a few steps short of Largo de São João Novo and rises toward the Vitória hill, and takes its name from a cobalt-blue azulejo tile pattern, the Belmonte, that still papers the façade of number 71 a few doors along. The area was the JudiariaNova do Olival, established by King João I in 1386 as Porto's enclosed Jewish quarter, an authentic ghetto with iron gates that closed at sunset for one hundred and eleven years, until Manuel I expelled the Jews in 1496. The medieval synagogue itself stood on the site of the present Igreja da Vitória, the baroque church that several of B28's apartments happen to look onto, a piece of geographic resonance the building does not labour but quietly carries.

The neighbourhood today is Porto's most engaging arts-and-crafts district, dense with ateliers, small bars and quiet restaurants, the Museu das Marionetas, Teatro de Belomonte, and the Palácio de Belomonte. Palácio da Bolsa and the Ferreira Borges Market are two minutes on foot; São Bento railway station is a ten-minute walk; the Douro waterfront and the Port wine cellars of Vila Nova de Gaia are five minutes downhill.

The Custodian Alida

Alida Jamal, founder of B28 Apartments Porto, on a balcony of the restored 16th-century townhouse with the Sé Cathedral and Porto's old town in the distance | The Aficionados

B28 is the work of Alida Jamal and her husband Miguel, both raised in Porto's cobbled lanes and quietly determined to return something of the city to itself. Academically trained in Financial Management, Alida arrived in hospitality without a day of formal sector experience but with a clear, almost monastic, design instinct. Her project philosophy is plainly stated: keep the building's identity, respect its bones, fold modern comfort in without raising its voice. On the ground floor, she runs a creative salon with a pop-up concept store, stocking Portuguese craft, organic wine, design pieces by Portuguese makers and books, and hosts twice-monthly supper clubs with visiting chefs. The space also hosts yoga sessions and/or workshops, and is a space to grab a coffee. On the evidence of six years' restoration and a Távora-led rehabilitation, the building agrees.

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B28 Apartments

Intro

No Facadism

Stucco, Shutters & Mid-century soul

A Rua by Friars & The Old Jewish Quarters

The Custodian Alida

editors PICK

EDIT

Archi'terieurs

HOTEL - Antwerp, Belgium

Hotel Julien

Guesthouse - Donegal, Ireland

Breac.House

Netherlands

Durgerdam

RELATED

Intro

No Facadism

Stucco, Shutters & Mid-century soul

A Rua by Friars & The Old Jewish Quarters

The Custodian Alida

editors PICK

EDIT

Archi'terieurs

HOTEL - Antwerp, Belgium

Hotel Julien

Guesthouse - Donegal, Ireland

Breac.House

Netherlands

Durgerdam

RELATED

Hotel - Lisbon, Portugal

Pátio do Tijolo

Hotel - Alentejo, Portugal

L'AND Vineyards

Hotel - Tavira, Portugal

Hospedaria

Hotel - Tavira, Portugal

Pensão Agrícola

Private Rental - Alcácer do Sal, Portugal

Casa Fortunato

VILLAS - Koufonisia, Greece

Éros Kéros

HOTEL - Bad Gastein, Austria

Miramonte

VILLAS - Santorini, Greece

Aenaon Villas

Fine Hotel, Restaurant & Spa - Bregenzerwald, Austria

Hirschen

HOTEL - Vienna, Austria

Altstadt Vienna

HOTEL - Antwerp, Belgium

Hotel Julien

GUESTHOUSE - Lana, Italy

1477 Reichhalter

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