The Art of Leftovers

In Lisbon, a former office block becomes an unlikely argument for the beauty of second chances.

 There is a certain kind of designer who arrives at a building with a vision fully formed — a mood board, a palette, a signature. Lionel Jadot is not that designer. The Belgian interior architect and founder of Zaventem Ateliers has built his reputation on the opposite instinct: showing up to spaces others have abandoned, reading what remains, and following where the building leads. Jam Hotel Lisbon, which took five years and survived a pandemic to open, is the fullest expression of that philosophy to date.

The raw material was a derelict Lisbon office block, handed to Jadot by Jean-Paul Pütz, operator of the Jam hotel brand, with a rare and dangerous instruction: do whatever you like. What Jadot liked, it turns out, was restraint in the grandest possible sense. Cork-clad ceilings sourced from the nearby Barrosinha estate absorb sound with the quiet authority of something organic. Walls are left raw. The OpenStructures modular grid — a design philosophy built on disassembly, reuse, and circulation — organises the space conceptually, invisibly, like a grammar beneath the surface.

The execution was resolutely collaborative. Romanian designer Mircea Anghel carved modular bunk beds from burnt eucalyptus across the hotel's hundred rooms. Porto-based Flowco fashioned headboards from recycled shoe soles. Concrete lobby furniture by Ivan Daniel Cova sits alongside murals by Brazilian artist Ylana Yaari and hand-pressed cork-and-terracotta tiles by Grond Studio's Pieter Van Bruysse. At every turn, the hotel reads less like a single vision than like a city in miniature — plural, contingent, alive.

The best interiors don't announce themselves — they accumulate, like a city, through many hands and many intentions.

The Cabana rooftop bar arrives as the hotel's most openly pleasurable gesture: a long pool tiled by Bela Silva's hand-painted ceramics shimmering above the Lisbon skyline, ringed by handwoven plastic furniture and ceramic masks by Mon Colonel Spit. Below, chef Mauro Airosa's Mojjo restaurant serves fusion cuisine amid marble blocks rescued from a nearby quarry.

Jadot, characteristically, deflects credit. The hotel, he says, was always about Lisbon — its craftsmen, its artists, its deep capacity for reinvention. He merely provided the vessel. It turns out that is a very particular skill.

Key takeaways

• Jadot approached Jam Hotel Lisbon as a curator rather than a decorator, inviting local and international designers and artists to contribute to a space organised around the OpenStructures modular philosophy of reuse and disassembly.
• Every material tells a story of place and circularity — from cork-clad ceilings sourced locally to headboards made of recycled shoe soles and marble blocks rescued from a nearby quarry.
• The Cabana rooftop and Mojjo restaurant elevate the hotel beyond hospitality into a celebration of Lisbon's creative scene, craft traditions, and capacity for reinvention.