With an empire centuries older than the British one, the Portuguese can claim to have invented the global village. A more recent Portuguese invention is a new kind of village, where architecture meets golf. At Bom Sucesso (meaning good accomplishment), golfers, long associated with taste due to their traditional trousers, can live in houses designed by distinguished architects in the gated estate of a championship golf course. 

My journey to Bom Sucesso tees off in Lisbon, a mesh of ancient, dense urban fabric, terracotta-tiled roofs, baroque churches and vintage trams, imperial squares and a sweep of great avenue, all alive to a vibrant culture coloured by the sea. It’s the perfect Mediterranean metropolis, except that it’s on the Atlantic. You can read the city from the plane as it approaches an airport so close to the centre that the local bus connection takes only 20 minutes. 

Portuguese modernism has left its mark here, notably in the rectilinear concrete structures of the Gulbenkian museums, where Leslie Martin acted as a consultant, and the open, airy volumes defined by Alvaro Siza’s Expo 1998 Pavilion. Climbing through the narrow streets west of Rato, I tracked down Manuel Aires Mateus, one of the 23 Bom Sucesso architects. He has been in the news lately for his Grand Canal Square Hotel design in Dublin, inspired by the Giant’s Causeway, but he disowns it. ‘A terrible group of Irish developers and English decorators ruined the project, they made it a joke,‘ he says. He’s cavalier about his clients, expressing relief at coming second in a competition for a 300m-high Dubai skyscraper. 
 

Alvaro Siza's House for Bom Sucesso, photo by Herbert Wright

Aires Mateus is positive about dealing with the luxury resort developer, however. When the Bom Sucesso resort idea was conceived in 2003, ‘it was an opportunity for a big public expression of architecture,’ he says. But is there an issue about the sustainability of developing what are essentially compounds of second homes? ‘Yes,’ he admits. ‘It’s a problem for the planet. Imagine if the Chinese all had a second home in Europe. We all know there’s something wrong about it’.

All the Bom Sucesso residential architects are Portuguese, except for one Spaniard and David Chipperfield, so I asked about the local contemporary style. Aires Mateus says there is no single aesthetic, but talks about chã, a plain architecture with the ‘idea of the minimum of elements to get the biggest result’. With white plaster and mono-materiality, he says it is the opposite of high-tech, where there are ‘so many devices to make it light, it’s heavy. We accept the imposition of heavy walls, [and use] structure to make it light’. 

Bom Sucesso is less than an hour north of Lisbon in the Oeste region, which is far less developed than the popular Algarve. A motorway leads through idyllic rolling hills peppered with wind turbines. At the nearby walled medieval city of Óbidos, the annual Chocolate Festival was underway. Colourful confectionary houses, chocolate nymphs and giant walking fairy cakes vyed for attention.

The mayor, Telmo Faria, created this festival, and talks of making his manor a territory of innovation. This Sheikh of Dubai-meets-Willy Wonka may rule over only a few thousand residents, but he already has results like Bom Sucesso. The 160ha resort is open for business, and golfers are already swinging on a Donald Steel-designed 18-hole course. Golf course design has its own constellation of star designers like Jack Nicklaus or Nick Faldo, but the names suggest celebrity branding rather than golf legends actually becoming niche landscape architects. Steel is also world famous, but joined a UK championship golf course architecture practice in the Sixties and has worked on St Andrews. His Bom Successo course got a strong thumbs-up from the golfers I talked to. Snaking between the greens are curvy segments of land that are more construction site than finished build, but the resort claims that 85 per cent of its 601 residences have been sold, many to airline pilots. 

Inside the house by Nuno Graça Moura, photo by Herbert Wright

I stayed in a single-storey house, one of a row by Nuno Graça Moura, which from the road look like stark white bunkers. The walls close off Zen-like patio spaces by the bedrooms. With its clean Miesian lines and masculine black furnishings, it felt like being in a Thomas Demand remake of a Sixties design-magazine house shoot. Elsewhere are terraces of two-storey ‘townhouses’. Madalena Cardoso de Menezes’ ochre-finished blocks have a sweeping cantilevered roof that tackles solar gain as well as making a strong signature. Gonçalo Byrne’s terraces, by contrast, burrow into the thermal reservoir of earth, making a virtue of a sloping site while channeling light into a sunken patio.The star architect has to be the 75-year old giant of Portuguese modernism, Alvaro Siza, but his angular bungalow effort seemed mundane compared to others, although allegedly that hasn’t deterred José Mourinho from buying one. Aires Mateus’ houses, like those by Chipperfield, are still under construction. 

Townhouses by Madelena Cordozo de Menezes, photo by Herbert Wright

Bom Sucesso is an architectural experiment and early indications are bright. As a golf resort it has stiff competition – the region alone could have 15 of them by 2012. As to the idea of architect-villa resorts, the cat is out of the bag. As far away as Taiwan, for example, futuristic villas designed by the likes of Kengo Kuma and MVRDV are under construction in the Next-Gene20 resort. Riding back into Lisbon, I couldn’t help thinking how nice it would be if some of the houses I had seen were here, rather than on a remote private designer estate.