The French shoe designer Christian Louboutin, 58, has always had a flair for the dramatic. Even the act of sitting down to lunch at his home in Melides, Portugal, a quiet coastal town some 80 miles south of Lisbon, requires visitors to engage in a performance of sorts. Inset into the concrete top of his outdoor dining table are giant ceramic tarot cards arranged like place settings; guests are invited to pick the card with which they identify. “I am often the Sun or the Hermit,” Louboutin says. The Empress and the Lovers are popular choices. “But no one ever wants to be the Hanged Man,” he says with a sigh.
The designer, who also has a home in Lisbon, had been visiting nearby Comporta since the early 1980s, but when the once low-key beach town became a fashionable vacation destination, he started traveling farther south, to Melides, acquiring his then-148-acre property there in 2010. Reached via a dirt road and abutting a secluded lagoon, the compound comprises eight whitewashed single-story cottages surrounded by sand dunes and including several bedrooms and an atelier. Three structures converge around a large wooden deck, constructed at the suggestion of Louboutin’s former partner, the French landscape architect Louis Benech, who raised the ground level to afford a view of the ocean, some 750 feet to the west. It functions as a gathering spot for the many guests who come to stay throughout the year, as well as for Louboutin’s local friends, who often breeze in and out of the property at will; the winemaker Noemi Marone Cinzano lives just next door, and the textile designer Carolina Irving, whom he met when he was 18 and, as he puts it, “dragged here” in 2013, has a place a short walk away.
In 2021, Louboutin expanded his seaside village with the addition of La Folie, a 28-foot-tall concrete tower on a nearby plot that he intends to use for moments of contemplation during the day and as a party venue at night (it’s fitted with multicolor LED lights). And in 2022 he completed work on La Salvada, a blush pink guesthouse farther up the road. But the main compound is theatrical in itself, decorated to display Louboutin’s wide array of aesthetic passions. “I don’t remember names,” the designer says, “but I have a very big visual memory.” In the living room, a taxidermy tiger faces two vibrant Alexander Calder needlepoint works, hung above a faded cobalt blue Josef Frank sofa with a pepper bush and palm tree pattern. On the terrace, a screen featuring fossilized prehistoric rays that Louboutin had set into cement overlooks a coffee table fashioned out of a lump of pale green Chinese marble. The carport is home to a sunshine yellow 1970s Citroën Méhari jeep that Louboutin bought despite the fact that he doesn’t have a driver’s license. And at one end of the 82-foot-long swimming pool, just behind the terrace, is an intricately carved wooden pavilion that Louboutin found on a trip to Udaipur, India, and had shipped to Portugal to use as a cabana.
Later this year, the designer will open a hotel in Melides, giving him further license to shop for treasures — not that he needs additional encouragement. Recent impulse purchases include an entire gilded 19th-century Ottoman room interior that he bought in Spain and is currently in storage, awaiting a new home. “Don’t think about where you’re going to put it, because you probably don’t have a place,” Louboutin says of acquiring beautiful things. “But you may have a place later. I’ve been buying things like this for years.” On any given day, he is often fielding WhatsApp messages from multiple antiques dealers and artisans; his latest contact is an Armenian marble quarry owner who sends him photographs whenever he unearths an exemplary slice of stone. “This one looks like a bad pistachio ice cream,” says Louboutin of a slab in a recent snapshot. “And I love this one, but I’m afraid it would make me feel hungry all the time: It looks like a piece of ham!” He is considering commissioning a home to incorporate the Ottoman room and various other large objects he has stashed away. “The architect’s brief will be: I give you these five things, you have to invent something where everything will fit,” he says. But despite his love of antiques, Louboutin is not precious about his discoveries. A weathered crab-shaped chair, bought from the Parisian auction house Drouot and now positioned on the deck — “it seemed that it was made for here,” the designer says — long ago lost a claw.
This home is, after all, a place for enjoying the area’s rustic charms. Though Louboutin travels regularly (he also has an apartment in Paris, among other properties), he settles in Melides twice a year: in April, to design his namesake brand’s winter collection, and later in the summer, to relax. When he’s working, he rises at 7.30 a.m., goes for a run or a swim, then heads across the dunes to his atelier to begin drawing. His desk is a sea of Pantone pens, which he uses for sketching, and colorful Sharpie permanent markers, which he uses to sign the scarlet soles of his shoes — sometimes 600 pairs in a day.
On vacation, his schedule is looser. “I don’t like to be obliged to do anything, especially on holiday,” he says. “I think it’s the same for everyone.” He prefers to socialize at mealtimes, and when night falls, the group will inevitably repair to the firepit, set in an alcove beyond the deck and overhung with vines. “It has a nickname, Carla’s Corner,” he says — a nod to his friend the French model and singer Carla Bruni. After cocktails have been served, “it becomes the San Francisco guitar corner,” he says with a laugh. He leans back on one of the deck’s banquettes, wiggles his foot, which is clad in a red-soled brown leather sandal, and begins singing Bruni’s 2002 song “Quelqu’un m’a dit.” “I am a frustrated singer,” he says, pausing for breath. Fortunately, in Melides, the stage is always set.
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