Tour This Vibrant Beachy Escape in Portugal

Belgian designer Jean-Philippe Demeyer describes his work as “fearless and joyful.” It’s a good two-word thumbnail, to which you might want to add “exuberant,” “playful,” and even “anarchic” for the fuller picture. He claims not to have a style, but this seems disingenuous coming from someone whose creations are so distinctive. Take Gigi, a fashionable bar and restaurant in Ghent, Belgium, its interior bursting with color, fat stripes, punchy patterns, and a lemon-scattered carpet defying gravity to climb the walls and walk across the ceiling. This is the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from the cerebral elegance of his revered countryman Axel Vervoordt. “I have great admiration for the work of other decorators,” Demeyer says, “but I can only be myself. My ideas come from gut feelings—first about locus genii, then architectural structure. From there I can start layering and storytelling.”

Like all design professionals, Demeyer flexes his style to suit his clients, and is inevitably most himself when it comes to decorating his own homes. Until recently, he combined life and work in a moated medieval hunting lodge, with stables and an orangery where he had offices, a textiles workshop, and a home shared with his partners, Frank Ver Elst and Jean-Paul Dewever, that was also a showcase for his design ideas. They recently finished restoring and decorating a house in Bruges, but plan to move again when they find another property “with enough space to experiment,” says Demeyer. For him, home is as much creative playground as retreat. “We are all partners in the business. Frank has a very good eye and reins me in when I go too far. Jean-Paul is finance and organization,” he says. The three of them met on a beach 20 years ago and have been together ever since.

While their newest home was a work in progress, they wrapped up the renovation of their second, near Comporta in Portugal, last year. “We drove to a wedding in Spain, and while we were there I read a sentence in a travel magazine, ‘Comporta—Europe’s best-kept secret.’ We made a detour on our way home and fell in love with the place—more than 35 miles of empty beach, so much space, clean Atlantic Ocean, pine trees and paddy fields.” They bought a plot near the beach but were thwarted by planning regulations, then found a small farmhouse half an hour’s drive inland, surrounded by nearly 45 acres of olive trees and cork oaks.