The new Martinhal Residences in Lisbon’s dynamic Park of Nations, is the new addition to the award-winning luxury family residential resorts brand in Portugal. Martinhal Residences is seeped in the Lisbon art scene.
Alongside beautiful family-friendly resorts, Martinhal has been recognised by Savills as one of the top three branded residence brands in Europe, and is a strong supporter of country’s art and creative landscape.
We asked their founder Chitra Stern about the brand’s links to the regions Art scene.
Can you tell us about your approach to supporting art in Portugal and why you think it is important?
Portugal is our adopted home. We came here 20 years ago and loved it so much and saw so much potential we chose it as the place we wanted to start a business and grow our family. Supporting the arts is such a crucial part of developing the creative economy in Portugal and spotlighting the breadth of talent across various disciplines and mediums that the country enjoys.
How do you manage the integration of creativity, arts, and design within your resorts?
Making art and design part of our journey as we have created the Martinhal brand has been important to us. Much of the arts and craftspeople such as Kruella D’Enfer, Maria Imaginário and Tamara Alves, we worked with from the start, and we still work with today.
A decade ago, we came up with the idea of the Martinhal Luxury, Art and Design Weekend; an annual event that takes place at Martinhal Sagres, set up by the great creative team at O Apartamento. We bring together brands, artists, craftspeople, and designers over a special 3 days, for different workshops, and showcases to learn about Portuguese brands and creative ventures. In our new project Martinhal Residences, we are excited to have been able to work with Bordalo II for some artwork there, as well as other Portuguese artists.
The Edu Hub sounds like an ambitious and very exciting concept, what are you hoping will develop through this initiative and investment? What do you hope will happen to the future of creativity in Portugal thanks to your investment?
Both myself and my husband Roman grew up and studied in other countries and latterly met on our MBA programme at LSE in London. From our own experiences and that of our own four children, we have learnt a lot and continue to learn as to what constitutes a well-rounded education. In parallel, like most business owners, we have learnt a lot through the challenges of the past few years with the acceleration of societal, technological, and geopolitical changes. For us, it has really hit home that we all must learn to embrace taking up new skills and approaches to life and work if we want to stay ahead and be sensitive and receptive to the changes in the world around us.
The school, United Lisbon was the first chapter of Edu Hub, from my work with a government-led taskforce for FDI, our research showed the need for a quality international school within central Lisbon. We now have students from over 50 countries; are an IB World School and are a part of the Microsoft Showcase Network and are continuing to grow term on term.
Portugal has the second highest number of engineering graduates in the EU and has become a top spot for start-ups and incubators, we believe there is a real opportunity to created an ecosystem like Edu Hub Lisbon where educators and innovators can come together in pursuit of lifelong learning.
You recently supported the large-scale exhibition ‘Evilution’ by artivist Bordalo II at Edu Hub, can you tell us more about the idea behind that?
There has been a lot of rhetoric explored by companies and individuals in the context of sustainability. We wanted to signify our intent as a business and as individuals that the time is now and while we don’t profess to know everything, we know by creating more visibility around his work we hope it ignites more conversations around the climate emergency and how together we can work together to put these words in to action.
Putting Evilution in the context of a space like Edu Hub and making it free for all, we hope creates a forum for debate, learning and positive action.
There is this deep-felt connection with Bordalo II and his home city of Lisbon and even more so with our neighbourhood- just around the corner from Edu Hub is his large-scale Iberian Lynx sculpture which was commissioned for Expo 98. For us it conveys not only the important environmental message but symbolises the area’s renewal. A lot of contemporary art works hard to be subversive, Portugal has this wonderfully rich history of street art and artivism as it’s sometimes referred. There is this great universality about it, it helps connect people to a common cause and establish a sense of place. His art delivers a powerful message but in a way that is accessible across the generations. We have really observed this with Evilution – it has been a real catalyst for conversations amongst the school and college groups we have had through our doors.
