Inside Matriarca: A 19th-century townhouse in Porto, designed by Thurstan

PLACES & SPACES | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA

Join Fiona McCarthy for a tour of one of Porto's most beautiful new hospitality venues, an elegant, light-filled 19th-century townhouse overlooking the city’s historic Carlos Alberto Square. It's now home to Matriarca, the latest venture from the wine-making Symington family, designed by London-based studio, Thurstan. 

BY FIONA MCCARTHY | ROOMS & GARDENS | 10 JANUARY 2026

Matriarca in Porto, the latest venture from the Symington family © Martin Morell

Convivial hospitality runs through the veins of the British-Portuguese wine making Symington family, owners of revered brands such as the 205-year-old Graham’s port and the UK’s Hambledon vineyard (in partnership with Berry Bros. & Rudd).

Nowhere can this be more felt than at Matriarca, the clan’s latest project in Porto, inspired by their 19th century matriarch, Beatriz Leitão Carvalhosa Atkinson, and designed by London-based interior design studio, Thurstan.  

“After she married my great-great-grandfather Andrew James Symington in 1891, she loved bringing people together around exceptional food and exquisite wines,” says fifth-generation, Vicky Symington. The result is three inviting floors of restaurants and bars spread across an elegant, light-filled 19th century townhouse overlooking the city’s historic Carlos Alberto Square. Matriarca reflects the Symington family’s history and passion for port wine making, in a setting that embodies “the way we like to enjoy them ourselves,” explains Symington. “We wanted to blend the best of both of our cultures in a way that presents design, good and port in a modern context.”

Working with Thurstan’s founder, James Thurstan Waterworth – former European Design Director at Soho House before founding his studio in 2018 – they have drawn on local artists and craftspeople, reclaimed and repurposed materials, and sensitive restoration practices. “It was a lovely old townhouse," James says, "albeit in terrible condition, with a shop on the ground floor and the upstairs crumbling down, but the idea was to create the feeling of somewhere the first generation of Symington's might have called home."

Integral to creating a sense of place was the choice of materiality. An old tile discovered at the nearby architectural museum inspired Thurstan to work with Porto tile makers to create the pretty blue and white tiles that now line the first-floor kitchen walls. This in turn sparked the gentle powdery blue lime plaster – “custom mixed to reflect the blues of the buildings in the surrounding Baixa area” – swathing the walls of the Dining Room (also hand stencilled by a local artist), which works in harmony with the soft Farrow & Ball Blue Gray used to paint the house’s façade.

Beams in the ground-floor bar, underpinning a newly added mezzanine seating area, were rescued from one of the Symingtons' port houses; while local Portuguese tiles and stone sinks in the bathrooms – “reminiscent of the Douro valley schist where our wines are grown” – and Portuguese calçada cobblestone paving used for the wine bar’s floor “makes it feel both familiar and distinctive,” enthuses Symington.

Matriarca's wine bar, featuring custom-made furniture and a zinc-topped bar © Martin Morell

Mixing up furniture was key to achieving this long-lived-in feel. In the wine bar, vintage bistro chairs, a zinc-topped bar and lighting by Jamb and Beaumont & Fletcher jostle with stools in a light stained oak custom-made by Porto artisans and tall tables fashioned with reclaimed oak tops. “All the joinery was also made locally, but we had to spend time getting the patina right – they weren't used to scraping the wood back and messing it up a little, because we wanted it to feel like they’d been there for a while,” James explains. “Now there's a real lovely sense of texture when you're in that space.”

The rough hewn stone walls, which the Thurstan team discovered by chance as they stripped the space back, have been left exposed and whitewashed – an ideal backdrop to, by day, the floods of natural light and views of the busy square, and by night, the warm shadow play of candlelight. As “a super casual, very relaxed tapas wine and port bar,” it's a dreamy spot to enjoy toasted Douro almonds, marinated sardines and Bacalhau salt cod, says James, along with tranches of Queijo de Cabra and Serra cheeses, washed down with a glass of Casa de Rodas Alvarinho vinho verde.

The open kitchen creates an immediate sense of “walking into somebody's home,” he adds. Here, Matriarca’s Porto-born head chef, Pedro Lencastre Monteiro, a Nuno Mendes alumnus, oversees dishes such as grilled stuffed squid and hare soup, steamed snapper or roast pigeon, served with such Symington treasures as the highly revered Chryseia or Vesuvio reds produced at their estates in Duoro.

The seductive environ features smart reclaimed oak parquet flooring, antique chandeliers and deep petrol blue leather upholstered banquettes, teamed with cane-backed dining chairs modelled on an old design found at a Porto makert, which James adjusted slightly for comfort and had remade by a local artisan. “The effect nods to the elegance of the 19th century without feeling overly pompous,” he says.

Whereas for the top floor Attic Bar the mood is more modern and eclectic, with a mix of “antique and 20th century design pieces, stained glass replicated from some original found fragments to create a different feel to the rustic mood of the ground floor or the smartness of the first floor,” says the designer. “There’s a sense of inheritance, like when you bring your grandparents’ treasured pieces into your own home and combine them with contemporary design,” enthuses Symington.

Thurstan has captured the quiet elegance of our family’s quintas in the Douro which are “layered and authentic rather than flashy,” says Symington. This is no surprise, given some of the designer’s most recent projects have included restoring the charming 19th century The Bradley Hare coaching inn on the Duke of Somerset’s Wiltshire estate to designing the forthcoming Zetter Bloomsbury, a 68-room hotel set across six interconnecting Georgian townhouses near Russell Square. 

“I like to create spaces where I would love to spend time myself,” he says. In bringing together the many parts of the Symington’s family identity – not only their Portuguese and British roots, but also influences of the city of Porto and the Douro countryside where their wines are produced – Matriarca “symbolises five generations of family, wines, and work coming together under one roof, showing how our heritage continues to live and evolve into the future,” Symington beams.