Inside Interior Designer Jacques Grange's Comporta Home

Comporta, Portugal, the quiet coastal stretch of windswept dune beaches, pine forests, and verdant rice fields just an hour south of Lisbon, is often compared to other places at other times. People might say, It’s St. Tropez in the ‘70s. It’s the Hamptons in the ‘80s. It’s Ibiza in the ‘90s. When the Parisian decorator Jacques Grange first spotted the area’s 7.5-mile long beach with enormous dunes on a flight from Lisbon to Faro 35 years ago, he was immediately reminded of Africa. “It was like another world. The luxury of it is the nature that surrounds you,” says Grange, who recently broke ground on the Atlantic Club, a new, private residential community here that features 22 units designed by the decorator.

After that fateful flight, Grange asked his friend Vera Iachia, a Portuguese decorator and his former protégé who happened to own a home in Comporta, about the area. She invited him to visit her at her tiny thatched beach hut, which, at the time, had neither electricity nor water. Most residents navigated the beach via dune buggies and the rice-field canals by colorful wooden canoes. Grange was enraptured by the idyllic lifestyle and eventually bought Iachia’s mother’s former bungalow in the town of Carvalho. Despite being known for his lavish interiors (his clients have ranged from Yves Saint Laurent to Sofia Coppola to the Mark Hotel in New York), he opted for a no-fuss look for his humble retreat. He kept the simple shack-like exteriors and whitewashed the interiors. Grange outfitted the rooms with Moroccan rugs, rattan furniture, and colorful Portuguese ceramics. “I love the sea. I love the climate. I love the freedom here,” he explains. 

The Espirito Santo, one of Portugal’s biggest banking families, recognized that freedom when they first came to the region in the 1950s, when Comporta was still a rural backwater in Portugal’s agricultural Alentejo region. The local population was made up of rice farmers and fishermen. The Espirito Santo clan bought up a huge swath of the region and turned it into their summer playground. Various factions of the family settled into different clusters of traditional fisherman shacks and transformed them into mini-compounds. The aim was to be discreet about their new summer retreat—family members may have stocked their humble beach cabanas with family heirlooms and precious antiques, but one would never notice from the outside. In 1974, after the Carnation Revolution that dismantled Portugal’s then-authoritarian regime, the country’s banks were nationalized and Espirito Santo Group lost many of its assets. Many of the family members left Portugal to do business elsewhere and abandoned their homes in Comporta. But in the ‘90s, Iachia, a member of the Espirito Santo dynasty, and others started to return and began to distribute land to people outside the family.

After Grange moved into his compound, a wave of other fashionable friends—including the French-Arab model and muse Farida Khelfa, shoe designer Christian Louboutin, industrial designer Philippe Starck, and the German artist Anselm Kiefer—began to purchase properties here. Many friends, like Françoise Dumas, the Paris-based fashion publicist, would come to visit Grange and his partner Pierre Passebon for a few summers and ended up buying places of their own. “It’s so authentic, and the Atlantic here is much warmer than in France,” says Dumas, who used to own a vacation home in Biarritz. 

Most days are spent outdoors with leisurely family-style meals served under the straw roofs and refreshing dips in the pool. “You just go from house to house, from lunch to dinner,” says Dumas. When people do venture out, it might be for a horseback ride through the dunes or shopping for espadrilles and caftans at Lavanda or antiques and works by local artisans at the Stork Club, the gallery that Grange runs with his longtime partner Passebon and their pal Marta Brito do Rio. “It’s just for fun and for friendship. We wouldn’t do it if it was work,” says Grange.

Lunch at Restaurant Sal at Pego Beach draws a crowd on weekend afternoons. Multigenerational families linger over dishes of grilled octopus, clams, and bottles of local sparkling wines while their children play nearby in the sand. In the evenings, the action moves over to the Museu do Arroz restaurant, housed in a former rice husking mill, which is the region’s defacto country club. 

“But this isn’t St Tropez,” says Dumas. “This is a very simple place.” A few small, discreet hotels have opened up over the years, like The Sublime, which offers eco-friendly bungalows on a former cork tree plantation, and the Casas Na Areia, a group of seaside thatched-roof houses that feature white sand instead of traditional floors. Luxury group Aman has been developing on a beachfront resort for over a decade, which some locals gripe about.

There is probably no better person to understand Comporta’s homegrown, barefoot lifestyle than Grange, so it seems fitting that he is the mastermind and aesthete behind the Atlantic Club. The 25-acre plot backs up against the ocean with spectacular views of the rice fields and forests. Grange has enlisted his longtime friend Madison Cox to design the grounds. The thatched houses will all be done in the traditional candy striped blue-and-white palette. Cox wants to take a “zen but refined” approach to the gardens. “You don’t want it to feel too urban or sophisticated,” he explains. To that end, he’s planted loads of lavender, oleander, and fruit trees like figs and pomegranates. The key is working with the untrammeled landscape that is already here. “The luxury for me here is how wild it feels,” says Grange. “For me, Comporta is enjoying the landscape and doing nothing.”