Dá Licença

Vitor Borges and Franck Laigneau were looking for a holiday house. Borges is Portuguese and worked in art; Laigneau is a French gallerist and an authority on Jugendstil and the anthroposophical design of Rudolf Steiner. What they found instead was Herdade das Freiras, an olive estate above Estremoz dating to around 1830, once owned by the nuns of the Estremoz convent as a vegetable garden and later run as an olive-growing collective. They left Paris, spent five years working with the local architects Procale, and ended up with something considerably larger than a holiday house.

The estate runs to 120 hectares with more than 13,000 olive trees, planted on ground rich with the white and pink marble that Estremoz has quarried for centuries. That marble is the material logic of the whole place. The floors are marble. The bathtubs, basins and shower cubicles were hand-carved by artisans from the quarries, one of them taking two months to make. Borges designed side tables and lamps in it, produced by a local craftsman.

There are eight rooms in total, three rooms and five suites, ranging from 50 to 180 square metres across three buildings. Some have private pools, others gardens and terraces. Against whitewashed walls and dark granite floors sits the owners' own collection: Jugendstil and Steiner pieces, cupboards by the 19th-century Norwegian woodcarver Lars Kinsarvik, blankets by Mizzete Nielsen, ceramics by Susana Piteira. There is an art gallery underground, and a lounge with a teardrop fireplace.

Outside there are two geometrically precise pools, one of them a perfect circle ringed in stone and pink marble that has been compared, not unreasonably, to a James Turrell installation.

Dinner is served in the library, its shelves full of art and architecture journals, and is often cooked by Borges himself. The garden supplies most of it.

The views run across the olive groves to the Serra d'Ossa forest and the fortified hill towns of Estremoz and Evoramonte. Lisbon is about two hours. Suites start around €300 with a two-night minimum.