Hotel Torel Avantgarde

Portugal’s Torel hotels are a small but growing boutique-hotel family, each one with its own distinct identity. Torel Avantgarde, in the riverside city of Porto, takes art as its inspiration, and the name has a double meaning — it’s a reference to a local architecture and design movement dating back to the ’30s and ’40s, as well as a description of the kind of artists to whom the hotel is dedicated.

Marcel Duchamp, Nina Simone, Andy Warhol, Coco Chanel, Joseph Beuys, Zaha Hadid — a disparate group, but what they have in common is a spirit of adventure and revolution. The rooms and suites to which they lend their names inherit plenty of visual interest, but while each one bears a different style, all follow through with comforts that are familiar, even old-fashioned, from plush beds, robes, and slippers to espresso machines.

There’s a spa and two outdoor pools, from which one of the hotel’s finest views across the river is to be had. And you can say the same for the restaurant, whose terrace opens up onto the same vista. The concept is anything but avant-garde, but it pays to be traditional when the tradition in question is contemporary Portuguese cuisine.