The room
The room is in the historic centre of Albufeira, two minutes from the Municipal Market. A hundred and ten square metres. High ceilings. One large window facing the street. You walk in from the street and you're in the room.
The table
The table sits at the centre of the room. Twelve seats. Solid oak, made by a carpenter in Albufeira who works ten minutes away. It has marks on it — paint splashes, the odd nick — that accumulate over time. They're welcome.
No seat is reserved. Sit next to whoever you like, or whoever's free. Sometimes there's silence at the table. Sometimes there's conversation about what you're making. People come alone, people come in groups. The table holds all of it.
The walls
The walls change every week. Everything hanging was made in this room. No outside work, no extensive curation. What's up is what the people who came this week made.
If you'd like to leave your work to sell, we'll talk. We write your first name, the price, and a sentence if you want one. The studio takes 25%. The rest is yours, paid in cash at the end of the month.
There's also a small reserve of stored pieces — work people didn't want to take home or sell, but that stayed. They surface on the walls sometimes, by surprise.
The First Piece Wall
It's different from the other walls. It doesn't change. Every first-time visitor makes a small piece — palm-sized — and that piece stays. Forever.
The wall grows with the room. In five years it will have hundreds of pieces. In ten, thousands. Each one with a first name, a date, and a word if you want.
More about the wall →
The café
There's a small counter in the corner. Coffee, tea, soup of the day, sandwiches, and wine in the evening. The food is simple because the kitchen is small and because the long table, not the menu, is the point.
Lock your phone in the cubby and the coffee is on us. Not a rule — an offer.
The phones
Just inside the door there's a wooden shelving unit with numbered cubbies — made by the same carpenter who made the table. Ask for a number, stow your phone, take the key. If you need your phone, the bench outside is one step away. Phones aren't banned from entering. There's just nowhere to put one at the table.
Lock yours in and the coffee or tea is on us. That's it. No speech about it.
Come see the room.
How to visit →