The Rebello Hotel & Spa

'Is 10am too early for a port tasting?' ponders Dr Smith, scrolling the Churchill’s website over a breakfast of pastel de nata and eggs Benedict. 'It’s their only free slot today.'

Ordinarily I might baulk at the idea of glugging syrupy fortified wine before I’ve fully woken up, but ‘when in Rome’ and all that. Or when in Porto, to be precise. After all, few cities are so thoroughly soused in a specific tipple that they share the same name. Embedding us even deeper in port-making heritage, we’re staying at The Rebello — a hotel that rubs shoulders with the riverside warehouses of Vila Nova de Gaia, where casks of the sweet stuff have been stored since in the 17th century.

The first thing I spotted when the taxi drew up outside the previous evening — only a 20-minute drive from the airport, might I add — were a couple of the elegant, wooden barges that once transported wine barrels from vineyards upstream. Handing us welcome drinks of chilled white port (what else?), the receptionist explains that the hotel is named after these rabelo boats. Across our neighbours’ terracotta rooftops, Hollywood-style lettering proclaims a series of names familiar from Christmas dinner tables and cheese courses back home: Taylor’s, Graham’s, Cockburn’s...

Newcomer The Rebello keeps a comparatively low-profile on this south-bank strip, its subtle white signage peeping above a clean-lined stone façade. The ‘wow’ factor comes when you enter the cavernous lobby. A thoroughly modern mermaid cavorts across some tufted tapestries. Coils of salvaged shipping rope and chains have been cast into chunky lamps and planters for the indoor palms. A hunk of stone and tube of corrugated iron together form a faux fireplace centrepiece. From the poured concrete floors to the exposed piping overhead (painted an eye-popping crimson shade), these industrial-nautical-chic interiors are all feeling slightly familiar...

'Brooklyn!' I yelp, as we step onto the balcony of our third-floor studio. 'Beckham?' winces Dr Smith, bracing himself for some unprovoked celebrity gossip. 'No, Brooklyn, New York.' I make the case that this is what Vila Nova de Gaia — or at least some of its enterprising developers — is angling to become: a cooler, waterfront counterpart to Porto’s (low-rise) Manhattan. They’re technically separate cities, divided by the Douro River, although it’s easy enough to flit between them via the Luís I Bridge’s footpath or a five-minute ferry ride. And much like Brooklyn, staying in Gaia gives you a special perspective on the city proper.

The presence of construction sites and cranes across this quarter suggest that more disused warehouses are undergoing the luxury-hotel or apartment treatment, just as The Rebello took over a long-shuttered kitchen-utensil factory. The general air is of a hardworking dockside reborn. A new-ish boardwalk wiggles its way towards Atlantic beaches, the perfect breezy, scenic route for Dr Smith to keep up his marathon training with an early-morning run.

There’s a lot to love inside our studio, too. Take the artworks. Avoiding the corporate blanding so often seen in hotel art collections, The Rebello’s quirky pieces are genuinely memorable. I mean, I’d never considered the likeness between the Venus de Milo and a pair of AirPods until laying eyes on the print opposite our bed.

Settling down on the balcony, Dr Smith flicks through the in-house newspaper, a witty reimagining of humdrum guest directories. He may not be the sort of bloke to pore over the pages on interior design, or geek out on the typography, but a note on the 'not so minibar' does get him going. Those full-size bottles of wine and craft beers in the Smeg fridge? 'First round is on us,' writes The Rebello, generously. No time is wasted uncorking the chilled white on our balcony, as we watch the rabelos bobbing in the Douro below and the narrow, colourful merchant’s houses of Ribeira, Porto’s old town, lined up like kids’ crayons on the opposite bank.

Uncorking and cooling is as much action as our pristine kitchenette sees that weekend — although I start to see the appeal of whipping up some eggs and toast in your own space in lieu of the rather cramped, hectic breakfast-buffet set-up down in the restaurant Pot & Pan. By way of crowd-control during peak season, guests are encouraged to pre-book a slot the day before, but I slightly flinched at this — holidays are about ditching the schedule, right?

Likewise, we take a longing look at the subterranean spa, befitting of a Roman emperor, with its stone vaults and classical urns, before agreeing that port-tasting and museum-going (museums dedicated to wine and chocolate, specifically, at nearby cultural complex Wow Porto) must take priority over a swim and sauna on this minibreak.

One thing it’d be criminal to skip, however, is the hotel’s rooftop bar. In a city where sunset-watching is an art form, Bello is now up there with the best miradouro, as the Portuguese call their hilltop viewpoints. We’re lucky to snag one of the nautical-striped sofas for a front-row seat, as tiled façades turn to gilded mosaics all along the Ribeira waterfront, and lights flicker on across the soaring steel arches of Porto’s bridges.

Our choice of sundowners? There are nine types of port on the drinks list, but since we’ve been sampling that stuff since our mid-morning tour of Churchill’s, we decide to break from tradition and opt for one of Bello’s refreshing signature cocktails, Golden Crew, a concoction of saffron, apple and vodka. After all, while Gaia’s claim to fame is those storied port houses, it’s flexing in a younger, cooler direction now, and The Rebello is a totem for this new chapter.