Sustainable Decoration

Walk into any homeware shop in spring and the sustainable range is easy to find: recycled-cotton cushion covers and bamboo trays, each with a little green leaf on the label. They are pleasant things. They are also the smallest objects in a room, and the least likely to be thrown away.

In a house on this coast, sustainable decoration lives in the big pieces: a sofa and a dining table you are still using in fifteen years outweigh any number of recycled cushion covers, and nobody prints a leaf on those. A sofa whose foam gives up in its second summer, as cheap foam often does, cancels out a great deal of bamboo.

The big pieces, and the damp

A three-seater is a frame, springs, several kilos of foam, metres of fabric and a van ride. A cushion cover weighs about as much as a sandwich.

And the big pieces are exactly what an Algarve house is hardest on. Plenty of second homes here sit shut from October to Easter, shutters down, and whatever is made of chipboard spends the winter drinking the damp (worse a street back from the sea, in Armação de Pêra especially). The owners come back in May to a wardrobe whose veneer has lifted at one corner. Nobody chose that. It happened while the house was empty, which is why the first thing we do with a chair in the showroom is turn it upside down.

Upside down, cushions off

Solid wood fixed properly, or veneer over particleboard held with staples: from underneath you can tell in about three seconds. Both have their place. Only one of them gets through a winter by the sea, FSC sticker or not (the certification is real and tells you where the tree grew, it just has nothing to say about the wobble in year three).

Then we unzip things. Covers that come off can be cleaned for years and eventually replaced while the frame stays put, which is the whole reason we offer upholstery cleaning and anti-stain treatment as a service, and why our atelier makes cushions and curtains to measure: the soft layer of a room can change a dozen times around the same sofa. If the covers are sewn on, ask why.

Foam we ask about every time, and get the vaguest answers to. What is it, how dense. A seller who changes the subject has told you plenty. Our guide to choosing a sofa goes on about cushions at some length, on purpose.

The manufacturers we work with at H&P Mobiliário e Decoração are spread from the north of Portugal to the south, and that helps here more than people expect. A broken leg six years on means a phone call to a workshop that still exists. For the alcove nothing off the shelf will fit, made-to-measure furniture is often the more durable answer, even if it sounds like the extravagant one.

Things we would rather not sell you

Furniture bought to be thrown away, mainly in rentals. Owners explain the logic to us often enough: buy cheap and swap every few seasons. Over ten years it seldom comes out cheaper and the skip fills twice as fast; what does survive a season of guests is in our notes on furnishing a holiday rental.

Natural rattan on an open terrace, too. It is beautiful under a roof and done for after a couple of summers in full sun, as the piece on garden furniture in the Algarve argues at length.

The greenest chest of drawers is often already in the house anyway. An inherited sideboard with a ring mark, the dining chairs that came with the place and have been reglued twice. Nobody sells you those, so they rarely make it into articles like this. Putting them next to new things without the room turning into a storage unit is a knack, and there is a whole piece on mixing old and new furniture; keeping sun and damp off them afterwards is most of what our furniture care page says.

If one of the big pieces is on your list, come and sit on it first, in Albufeira or Armação de Pêra, and feel free to turn it upside down while you’re there; we do it all the time.