Vitor Borges and Franck Laigneau set one-off vintage furnishings against whitewashed walls to create a series of unique spaces inside this boutique hotel in southeast Portugal.
Dá Licença is located a few miles outside the historic city of Estremoz, perched atop a hilly 120-hectare plot of land that's blanketed in mature olive trees.
With a total of just eight guest rooms, the hotel has been developed by creatives Vitor Borges and Franck Laigneau to be more akin to a guesthouse where visitors "already feel at home".

"Today in Europe, where can you find a place that is still preserved" This is why we decided to do something very discreet ? the region gives the impulse to retreat into nature, for slow living," Laigneau explained to Dezeen. "We have all the services of a hotel, but in a more personalised way."

The land had previously been host to the ruins of agricultural outhouses that were used by a convent of nuns in the mid-19th-century to grow vegetables, and later by a commune of farmers to produce olive oil in the 1980s.
Borges and Laigneau enlisted the help of locally based architecture practice Procale to transform them into three whitewashed buildings that could host the hotel's amenities.

One building accommodates a series of communal spaces. These include the dining area, which is centred by a tapered hanging sculpture with a bark-like surface, and a living room, where sage-green armchairs are arranged around a stone coffee t...