Inspira Liberdade Boutique Hotel

Like so many things in Lisbon, Inspira Liberdade Boutique Hotel is an excellent value. At first glance it looks simply like a mid-range, mid-size, middle-of-town boutique hotel, with a pleasant stone and white-stucco façade just like all the others on its cobblestone street. But then you step inside the long, airy lobby, its wood-slatted windows casting patterned shadows into the room, and it’s immediately clear that Inspira Liberdade Boutique Hotel is more ambitious than that first glance suggested. In place of the expected little breakfast nook, there’s a bright contemporary restaurant whose open kitchen is knocking out excellent Mediterranean fare. There’s a surprisingly cool bar, a business center, a brand-name spa, and on it goes — ticking off each item on the list of amenities expected of a larger, more expensive hotel.

The entry-level accommodations are simple, initially almost utilitarian, but poke around the pared-down, vaguely mid-century room and you find that they’ve gone to the trouble to include the sorts of little in-room amenities you might actually use, like Nespresso machines and free wi-fi. And while nothing is gold-plated, there are pleasant decorative touches like faint geometric shapes on the walls, pops of color here and there and big glass-walled showers. It turns out the choices are all informed by feng shui, which, if you’re skeptical, is simply another way of saying they’ve married form and function while keeping the spaces open and uncluttered.

Sometimes a hotel offers more for less by locating in an out-of-the-way location — not Inspira Liberdade Boutique Hotel. This one is just off Marques de Pombal Square in the city center, a short hop from Lisbon’s central Avenida da Liberdade and a couple subway stops (or a fifteen-minute walk) from Baixa and Barrio Alta in the older part of the city. Right in the middle of Lisbon, but far less middle-of-the-road than it might first seem.