My friend Nancy wanted to know more about our yellow house, so if you’re interested too here goes.
Ken finds all our travel accommodations through a research method he has developed for himself. He’s learned back door ways to get second, third and fourth angle looks at the places that interest him, and we are rarely disappointed in the houses and apartments he finds for us to stay in.
We’re old, well, oldish, and set in our ways, so we have some things that we have to have and these can sometimes outweigh other considerations. We’re far away from family and friends, so good wifi is a must. Centuries old is great, but we no longer feel the love for corkscrew stair cases and low ceilings and doorways [resulting in near concussive bruising on more than one occasion] which we did love in our earlier European adventures). We don’t like eating out every meal, so a decent kitchen we can work in comfortably is a must. And we like to be able to park the car somewhere in the vicinity of the house. Given many of the places we rent are in medieval cities, towns or perched villages, this isn’t always possible.
So our yellow house in Olhao. I still don’t know how to say the name of the town we are in, and I still have to check that I’ve spelled it properly (and yes, there’s an accent missing over the a). Saying the house is shabby chic is kind. I know people who would turn up their noses and leave, but it was a wonderful place and we loved it.
Land is scarce in most European countries, so houses are small and extend up not out.
This place is huge by European standards. It’s one-and-a-half rooms wide and two generous rooms deep. And tall. Just when you think you are at the top, you aren’t.
The doorway is right on the street. We have a narrow amount of sidewalk in front of our door, but you basically stand in the road to open your door. Stepping out can be exciting if you haven’t checked the traffic situation.
You unlock the door and walk in the front to a flight of stairs before you. The key by the way is so three dimensional I’m amazed by it. It takes often four full tries to get it into the lock the right way up. But once the key is in the lock, give it a full two and a half twists and you are in the house. You wouldn’t want to be running for your life because it takes time to get in then out again to close the door and lock it with the key from inside.
But once inside….to your left and up a step (everything is up or down a step) is the living room. It’s a typically sized room, with two windows on the front wall, a fireplace on the left wall (I don’t know east and west here, sorry, I’m lucky if I can find up and down), and open on the back and down two steps into a dining room. Beside the dining room (and behind the stairs) is a beautifully fitted and equipped kitchen. Several different sizes of plates and bowls, cutlery, several ways to make coffee (yay!) and tea, lots of pots and pans, plenty of glasses, wine glasses, beer glasses. Huge, certainly by European standards, fridge complete with the lower half freezer. Also under the stairs is a half bath.
A lovely bouquet of flowers, likely from the hosts’ own garden awaits us on the dining room table, along with a welcoming note, a bottle of Portuguese wine and four of the much praised Portuguese custard tarts.
The ceiling over the living room part of the main floor is amazing. I always say “look up every time you enter a European room” and that is certainly the case here. The ceiling over the living room is probably 18 feet high and brick. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it is curved. Vaulted, perhaps is a better word.
Portugal is very like Provence in terms of colour. Sort of. And on the inside. So far, at least the towns we have driven by or through are largely made up of white buildings with red clay tile roofs. Not exclusively, but usually mostly, anyway. Because of the heat in summer, we’re told. Our house is yellow, you also see ochre, blue and sienna red houses from time to time, but the predominant colour is white. Inside, what we have witnessed is an explosion of colour. Like Provence. Gold, red, orange, green.
The walls in our house are mostly orange. Tiles are everything from gold and orange and red, to blues and turquoises and green in the half bath.
And everything is hard. The floors are stone. One love-seat-sized sofa in the living room is stone with a cushion. The countertops in the kitchen are concrete. The walls are at least three feet thick. And in spite of the house sharing walls with other houses on at least two sides (I don’t know about the back), it is a quiet house. Probably because the walls are stone and three feet thick.
Back to the front door. Up 13 stone steps, hundreds of years old, well trodden, all slightly different heights. And higher than conventional North American steps. We walk up holding on to the walls. There’s a stone bannister, but it doesn’t give me much faith that I could clutch it and save myself if I stumbled. So on the first floor is the first bedroom, with a lovely closet and bathroom, complete with a nice shower. On the landing outside this bedroom we are faced with two sets of stairs. On the right, a curving set of 15 (I told you before, I count everything) stairs takes us the the second floor (I’m being very European here, at home it would be the third floor) and another en suite bedroom. We make this our bedroom as it has bed side table and lamps for reading in bed. It’s very comfortable, again done up in oranges, browns, reds. But because of the steps, when we go down in the morning, we make sure we haven’t forgotten anything that would require another, extra trip up and down the stairs. The stairs weren’t mentioned in any of the websites we checked!
Back down to the second flight of eight stairs on the first floor landing, which takes you to the roof top terrace, a lovely space, protected from the wind and furnished with tables and cushioned chairs, and complete with potted trees and plants. No gardens in a town like this, so green thumbs are indulged in potted plants on terraces. Then another set of stairs up to the tippity top of the house for another roof top terrace. Complete with barbeque. Our hosts pointed out all the conveniences from this terrace…the fresh vegetable market, a block over there, the best bakery in town, half way between the house and the market, the best fish restaurant in town, two blocks that-a way, and a grocery store about 50 steps that way.
Ken spent time on the first terrace reading in the sun. He went up to the second terrace once and the stairway terrified him: he came down and said “We won’t be doing any barbequing!”
Although lace curtains cover all the windows, the true window coverings are internal shutters. The kitchen and dining rooms have no outer exposure, so the rooms have been cleverly done up with faux windows. Over the sink in the kitchen our “window” overlooks a terraced garden, and comes complete with a daylight lamp and greenery. It makes the kitchen almost daylight bright. Our dining room “window” is not lit, but does have greenery.
Bedding is weird. No top sheet, because of course we are in Europe and they don‘t do top sheets the way North Americans tend to. But the queen-sized bed is dressed with two twin-sized comforters. We found the same thing when we were in Stockholm several years ago, only in Stockholm the quilts didn’t cover the top of the bed. They didn’t even meet in the middle, so we were pleased that these quilts overlapped. I have to say, I don’t understand.
And I have to talk about doors. Ken has been fascinated by doors and windows across Europe. This trip is no different. While the houses are mostly white (except as excepted previously), doors are more telling. The doors across from us are red and blue. And some of them are so weather-beaten you have to wonder about their stories. Door knockers are interesting too, some shaped like disembodied hands. To me, they’re kinda spooky. But hey.
Parking is interesting. The street in front of our place has recently become one-way. Let me rephrase that, the one way street in front of our house has recently changed direction, so Our Lady of the Dash (the GPS system) was very confused when we couldn’t turn where she wanted us to, and the only solution we could come up with was for Ken to back up our street so the car would be facing the correct direction. Whew. When he finished, I was trapped in the car. But we got it sorted and transported suitcases to house. And never did it again, parking in a spot about a block from the house..
Taking out the garbage has taken on new meaning. You don’t just go out to the black or green bins in your garage. The streets, certainly in the old centre where we were located, are too narrow for garbage trucks to make rounds, so people carry their garbage. In our case it was a three block walk to the garbage centre, which was made up of four cans for composting garbage, and one each for plastic, paper, glass and garbage. They looked like single cans, but they were part of an underground system. Not a hardship.
We were beautifully positioned in our house and walked all over Ohlao finishing our day often at the water front with either gelato or a double espresso watching the sun go down over the Atlantic.
Ahhhh the Algarve.
From the living room into the dining room, kitchen to the right. And of course the ceiling above.
A door seen on one of our walks through town.
Our lovely welcome.
The key.