Our Story:
From the Urban Rhythm of London to the Serenity of Ibiraquera.
Ibirahill isn't a pousada.
It's the house we couldn't find anywhere — so we built it.
The Sunday feeling
We knew the Sunday feeling well. That shadow that arrives late in the afternoon, when the coming week starts to weigh before it has even begun. We spent years like that in London — marketing, advertising, airports. A life that, from the outside, looked right.
We travelled a lot, stayed in the best places the world had to offer. And still, every Sunday, the same question came back: what if we lived another way? That question is the one that later became Ibirahill.
The wall
We bought a plot in Ibiraquera on one of those trips and left it there, the way you keep a plan for retirement. But the Sunday feeling doesn't wait for retirement. It came back every week, asking for an answer.
Around that time a book — Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth — put words to what we already felt: most of the weight came from the roles we play, from expectations that were never ours. We decided to put down what wasn't ours.
We turned the home office into something else. On one wall, we put everything we wanted from life — and only what we wanted. What didn't fit on the wall didn't fit in the plan. Then we drew the timeline to get there, and started crossing things off.
When the time came, we sold almost everything. What was left fit into a few suitcases and one decision.
Building what was missing
We came to the hill to live slowly, and soon realised something: the place we'd looked for around the world didn't exist. So we built it.
Each house was drawn over the shape of the hill, not against it. We didn't put up buildings with a view — we built refuges that place you inside the landscape, not in front of it.
Nothing in excess. Not the biggest pool or the newest TV, but enough: enough to let you feel the silence, the forest, the light changing through the day. Everything arrives already resolved — the kitchen stocked, the paths marked — so nothing stands between you and the place. And you reach somewhere you haven't been. Outside, and inside yourself.
The seed
We could have kept all of this to ourselves. But what this place did to us was too big not to share. Sleeping without traffic noise, waking to nothing but the forest — it changed how we live the rest of the year.
Every guest who passes through carries away, if they let it, a seed: that the life you want doesn't have to wait for retirement. Here, no one needs to be anyone. Only to be here.