Philippe Starck Is Shaping a New Retreat Around Village Life in the Portuguese Countryside
Observer ·
A few minutes from his own home in Melides, Starck is helping shape ASerra, where villas, a hotel and a timber village are planned across 210 acres of woodland.
Philippe Starck describes the countryside around his Portuguese home as “a little like Out of Africa , but in Europe—and without snakes.” He now does much of his work in these hills, among ochre earth and cork oak trees, with the Atlantic Ocean on the horizon. What was meant to be a year in Portugal has become 13, and he recalls the feeling of roots extending from his shoes into the soil. “I am home,” the 77-year-old French designer tells Observer during an on-site preview of ASerra , the hotel and residential development planned a few minutes from his own house.
Starck’s collaborations with Ian Schrager at New York’s Royalton and Miami’s Delano helped turn hotel lobbies into social destinations. At ASerra, he is applying that interest in shared spaces to a community of homeowners and hotel guests. Across more than 210 acres (about 85 hectares) of woodland near Melides, 22 private villas and a 25-suite hotel are planned, with the hotel scheduled to open in mid-2028. A timber village at the foot of the hill is intended to reconcile the privacy of homes offered off-plan from €6 million (about $6.7 million) with the pleasures of having company close at hand. Starck initially declined to work on the development, but reconsidered after discussing the prospect of a good spa and bar nearby with his wife.
ASerra joins a stretch of coast where boutique hotels sit alongside large residential estates. Christian Louboutin ’s 13-room Vermelho is in Melides itself, while Sublime Comporta added its 43-villa Sand wing farther north this year. Between Comporta and Melides, Discovery Land Company’s CostaTerra is a private club planned for roughly 300 homes, with a golf course and its own village. Across the wider Alentejo, overnight stays rose 3.6 percent in the first eight months of 2026, compared with 1.5 percent nationally, according to Turismo de Portugal . In September, Portugal’s government ordered a coastal-planning review after inspections of the Tróia-Melides shoreline, citing rising demand and the need to safeguard public beach access.
For ASerra’s developer, family-owned Larfa Properties , the attraction began with Melides itself, where rice-growing lowlands toward the Atlantic give way to the cork oak hills of the Serra de Grândola. CEO Stéphane Delplancq says he and his wife fell for the area during a visit and took time to study its culture and architecture. Larfa brought Starck into the project to shape the interiors and village concept. Architecture is by Lisbon studio Atelier AAVV, with Gorka Goita leading the project, and landscape design by Filipa Cardoso de Menezes of FC Arquitectura Paisagista. The team says it reduced the height of an earlier scheme and opened up the layout to use less concrete. Starck describes houses partly embedded in the earth, their subtly colored concrete intended to resemble rock from a distance, with broad windows facing the sunset.
The same sensitivity to the environment and cultural bounty guides the interiors. “Make the minimum, but with the highest level of quality. And using this quality with one rule: timeless, timeless, timeless,” he tells Observer. For the Portuguese-made tiles, that means motifs drawn from nature and fantasy, avoiding colors tied to a season’s fashion. Ceramics have a long history in Melides, where pottery production is documented from at least the 17th century, and a former pottery now houses the municipal museum and workshops. This summer’s What Remains Between exhibition, connecting cultural venues in Melides and Comporta, included hand-cut ceramic panels and textiles made from upcycled fibers. ASerra’s proposed studios for pottery and painting would enter a place with an active craft culture of its own.
Starck, in fact, wrote a fictional story for ASerra in which family and friends discover a house filled with books and musical instruments, with a note inviting them to a village where people are making music and preparing food. The planned setting for such encounters is a wooden street raised on stilts among the trees, reached on foot or by bicycle through the woodland. Starck likens it to Barcelona’s Las Ramblas: studios and places to eat would occupy the same continuous deck, bringing people with different errands along a shared route. He asked for a market terrace large enough for vegetable stalls and celebrations, imagining children’s birthday parties and drinks with friends at sunset, with room to “dance all the night.” Villa occupants and hotel guests are to share the facilities, with year-round service and accommodation for some staff on a second plot.
A similar idea is already being tried elsewhere. At Zannier Île de Bendor on the French Riviera, which opened in May, daily artist talks end with refreshments in its artisans’ village square, a standing reason for guests to linger together. Zannier, though, is a hotel, open to anyone who books a night. ASerra grafts the same sociability onto an enclave of privately owned homes, so the village is built first for the people who own them. The villa prices make Starck’s village a selective one, from a designer who has long championed improving life for as many people as possible. Asked what ASerra should offer people who will never own a villa, he turns to the audience he expects it to find: the remoteness, he says, will repel some and draw others who recognize the appeal he finds in Melides and share the local community’s values. Starck’s reputation raises the project’s profile, and his home, just a few minutes away, lends his enthusiasm the credibility of experience. Hotel guests could bring changing company to returning homeowners, giving the village a life beyond its private terraces. ASerra’s value as a model for other hotel-and-residential ventures will depend on whether those encounters become part of the pleasure of returning time and time again.