André

A Small Guide to Lisbon was born Lisbon ’06
Created for a few friends visiting Lisbon during a conference. A small page with places to eat, drink, walk, look, and stay curious. It kept being updated and shared with visiting friends for almost twenty years: restaurants, wine bars, walks, museums, and things worth living for.

Put together a guide for every visited city World ’06–’26
Private notes became private guides. Every trip left a trail: places visited, places missed, rooms to return to, restaurants worth remembering, museums that stayed, streets that explained the city. They were updated with each visit and quietly shared with friends over the years.

Decided to share them with anyone Kyoto ’26
Japan, and especially Kyoto, made the habit impossible to keep private. The research became deeper. The notes became denser. The places were too beautiful, too careful, too alive not to organize properly. Small Guide became a way to make that attention available to anyone.

Help people discover beauty Everywhere
Even in their own city. Especially in their own city. A good guide should not only help someone find a place. It should help them look again.

Give visibility to care People
Small Guide is for places made by people doing what they love with attention: chefs, baristas, booksellers, architects, makers, wine people, hosts, gallerists, craftspeople, and owners who still care about the room.

Make the web beautifully Online
A website can still be a beautiful creative process. Not a funnel. Not a platform. Not a feed. A page, carefully made, with links, typography, restraint, and a little respect for the person reading it.

Observe deeply
A room, a counter, a shelf, a dish, a bottle, a building, a ritual, a person.

Compress without flattening
The work is to make judgment portable without making it generic.

Mark what matters
Planned. Soulful. Added in a year. Kept over time.

Remove until it has pressure
The guide earns trust through what it leaves out.

Wine
Adegga, wine writing, regions, bottles, memory. Taste as structure.

Coffee
CoffeeSpots, rooms, baristas, cities. Discovery through people, not ratings.

Search
SEO, PageRadar, audits, digital reality. Making hidden structure visible.

Cities
Lisbon, Kyoto, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Seville, Venice, Rio de Janeiro.

A place enters because it belongs
Not because it is popular. Not because it paid.

A small ad
A place can pay to get more attention, never to be included.

A light site is a form of respect
For people, paper, machines, devices, energy, the web, and the original spirit of Tim Berners-Lee’s idea: useful pages, stable links, readable documents, and an internet that remains open enough to belong to everyone.

Locally literate, visually quiet
The guide should know where it is without becoming noisy.

◎ Soulful
A place with unusual presence, care, continuity, or life.

◌ Planned
Researched, intended, not yet judged in the room.