** In this house, art is a sight to behold.

In this vacation home, the landscape plays a primary role.

In the living room of Eddie Roche's country house, founder of the Le Labo brand, in the Alentejo region, Portugal, a Pierre Augustin Rose sofa and vintage chairs share the space with pillows, ceramic lamps and a wooden table created by the Flores textile studio, as well as a pouf made from a grassy marsh plant called bulrush and crafted by one of the few artisans in the country still working with this material.

Source:"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/t-magazine/portugal-alentejo-eddie-roschi-house.html"

The impression of entering Eddie Roshi's country house in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal creates a sense of disorientation all on its own.

The first thing you see at the end of the long dirt driveway is a massive concrete facade shaped like a boomerang, 150 feet long and 11 feet high. "When I thought about building a house on this beautiful land," says Roshie, co-founder of the fragrance company Le Labo, "my first idea was to create a space where you immediately encounter a barrier." A narrow opening in the center of the building reveals a small courtyard, where an oak tree is set, and two doors made of eco-modified Kebony pine (an environmentally friendly wood sustainably grown for durability) wrap around the single-story house. Both doors open into long dark corridors: one runs through the east wing, the other through the west. After taking a few steps down either corridor, turn south, and you suddenly find yourself in a vast 1,800-square-foot space: part living room, part dining area, and kitchen, all clad in Kebony wood. Instead of a back wall, there are 115 feet of sliding glass doors set at an angle to create the impression of a huge balcony.

On a sunny day, it takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust to both the light and the expansive view of the cross fields, grasses, oaks, and olive groves.

Source:"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/t-magazine/portugal-alentejo-eddie-roschi-house.html"

Eddie Roshi

Born in Lugano, Switzerland, and raised in Hong Kong and São Paulo, Brazil, he founded Le Labo in 2006 in New York City with business partner Fabrice Penot, whom he met while working at L'Oréal. They designed a flagship store in the Nolita neighborhood of Manhattan to resemble an old-fashioned pharmacy; the staff wore white lab coats and mixed each fragrance on-site. A year after the partners sold the company to Estée Lauder in 2014, Roshi, his wife - perfumer Daphne Bugey, and their young daughter (they now also have a son) moved from France to Portugal, initially settling in an apartment in Lisbon. During trips around the country, Roshi fell in love with Alentejo, an agricultural region stretching south of the Tagus River and west from the Spanish border to the Atlantic coast, where medieval villages are separated by olive groves. A friend told Roshi about 124 acres of land for sale in the area, a plot called Fonte das Perdizes, or Partridge Spring in English, located 25 miles from the famous beach town of Comporta.

Source:"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/t-magazine/portugal-alentejo-eddie-roschi-house.html"