Page 54 - Decadence

NUNO RODRIGUES BRIGHT HORIZONS
Porto is not the place I would expect to be travelling to in late November, let alone to have lunch on the beach. But we have own in to
visit Nuno Rodrigues CEO and founder of Stabord an award winning design company making contemporary furniture. Nuno is a renowned interior architect his sister company Metrobox has designed, built or overseen many projects, not only in his home town of Porto, but from Madrid to Miami paying tribute to mid century and modern design.
He created the Stabord brand to express his personality, the 45 year old has a long time passion for snow boarding and long boarding, so it is not only furniture we are here to see. No, we are here to help develop a racing longboard with our own resident world championship rider Jenny Rain (none other than Paddock Life’s creative director). Nuno has seen the market for exquisitely built cruiser boards, but would like to inject some real downhill racing DNA into his creations.
We are collected at the airport by Nuno and his side kick Joao, as it is late morning they suggest we go directly for lunch, well they are Portuguese... so we can have some time to understand their brand, the guys, their way of life and the mission statement of Stabord. We head just outside Porto to a beach front restaurant, sitting on the terrace in tee shirts and sunglasses was not really what I expected at this time of the year. A huge sharing lunch of shrimp, crab, some weird looking sea urchins (which tasted amazing) and a perfectly prepared fresh sh, washed down with three bottles of fabulous Munro’s Antigone, Escolha, local wine. The conversation bubbled with their fascination for our motorsport lifestyle and ours with their design projects, whilst underpinning it all was Nuno’s appreciation of Jenny’s world championship position in a sport he loves.
After lunch Nuno produced his longboard cruiser from the boot of his Mercedes, this was the very rst prototype, nished in Ebony with a shtail. It was a work of art. Before we could even put it on the oor, Jenny was away, pushing off down the promenade to test the board. This was actually the rst time she had mounted a board since her crash in Killington Vermont, at the nal race of the season that left her on crutches with a broken right foot. Three weeks walking and she was riding again... But for me it was the rst time on a board in nearly 30 years, but I had to have a go. I’m happy to say it’s like riding a bike you never forget, but I don’t think I’ll be challenging our creative director to any races anytime soon.
No sooner had we checked in to the Porto Palacio Hotel, connected our computers and taken a quick coffee on the 19th oor rooftop terrace than Joao and Nuno are waiting in reception to take us to dinner. But rst is a tour of Porto; Nuno wanted to show us the development of the old town on the banks of the Douro river, a huge amount of which
he was the Architect for. We park and walk, as its the only way to fully appreciate this gorgeous city, the old buildings have been very sympathetically restored and converted to bars, restaurants and boutiques as the old narrow lanes climb and fall on the one bank of the river, whilst the opposite bank across the Iron bridge that took its design cues from the Eiffel Tower, is much atter. The architecture is perfect, an Art Deco boat house has a bar above the kayak store, tting perfectly with a glass fronted restaurant whose inside had proudly exposed brickwork of the original building.
We settle down in a small bar called “The Wine Barrels” for a pre dinner drink and chat, yes another bottle of Portuguese Red and sharing platter of cheese and hams. Again the bar was a very old building, we entered from the narrow street to a restaurant area, but went down the stairs to the cosy wine bar, putting us back on street level for the river bank concourse. The staff were friendly and very knowledgable about their Douro Family Estate wines, decanting a bottle for us chosen by
WORDS CRAIG BLAKE-JONES IMAGES JENNIFER SCHAUERTE
54