our founder & mentor
Frederic Coustols
An Interview with Frederic Coustols
At Palácio Belmonte, in 2020, on the subject of cultural restoration and urban regeneration using the iconic Lisbon palace, dated back to 198b.C as the subject of example from a collection of landscapes that serve as cases.
Frederic Coustols, Founder & Mentor of DaST Foundation
See more of Frederic
Mr. Coustols, you are 87 years old and smoke ten D4 Partagás a day. Most of them in a bathrobe. Are you working on a legend?
No. I am a lazy man. I never liked working. But I tried it and really worked for ten years . When I turned 30, my father asked me nicely to fly away and discover the world because he thought it was time and he no longer wanted to finance a man without purpose. I hated the thought, but studied and worked until I turned 40. After that I became a landscape collector because it was the only thing I could collect. Landscapes belong to everyone and everyone and nobody in particular.
How broke do you have to be to become a landscape collector?
Very broke. You don’t need millions, you can’t buy a landscape. You can just look at them as they are and try to understand them and then bring them whatever you think. You need an idea and people who are talented and interested in implementing this idea. That’s all.
How many landscapes do you have?
I do not own any. They own me. I am just their guardian.
Sorry, how many landscapes are you guarding?
Three. As you see I’m not a big collector but a very lazy man. The Castelnau des Fieumarcon in Gascony, a landscape in China and the Palácio Belmonte in Lisbon. Actually, it’s not a palace, it’s a House. We just had to keep the name the National Monuments gave the House.
Is Palácio Belmonte your monument, a legacy with which you want to say something to the world?
In a way, but the landscape you discover from the House does. You hardly have to say anything more about it. I was bought by the House on my first visit to Lisbon, over 30 years ago, without seeing the inside.
I wanted it to become my home and it wasn’t until I toured it, six months later that I understood its vast dimensions. It quickly became clear to me that it was impossible to live in a house like this by myself.
What is the first thing you do when you buy a 3700m2 monument from the 15th century?
Nothing. It’s such an overwhelming feeling that it’s trying to push you forward and overwhelm you that the best thing to do for a start is to do nothing, only watch the light falls and how it behaves during the day and the seasons how the noises that surround it sound like. This process took six years. We traveled all over the country studying its history, craftsmanship and culinary cuisine. That was the most important time in the whole process. The implementation and structural measures followed. We found wonderful Portuguese furniture, bought paintings and decided to furnish the house almost entirely with Portuguese products. I think there are five or six IKEA lamps in the whole building and we have a lot of lamps.
What does Palácio Belmonte want to tell us?
That it is important not only to restore a building to its original state, but also to revitalize the environment that created it. When we reopened the house as a hotel, I wanted to show what Portugal was to me. With a Roman tower, two Moorish towers, 300 year old azulejos and a main building that was built in 1449, this house is a rare vernacular sculpture and a résumé of this wonderful country. You came to Lisbon at a time when the country was not still wooing people with huge pensions who could enjoy tax advantages here. And I was lucky as I did not have a huge pension. Portugal joined the European Union, the passport trade grew, Lisbon was on the verge of decline.
Was it naïve to believe that people would dutifully restore their houses without making a profit?
The policies brought a new population to the city, and in the first few years it wasn’t much more. The problem lies within the human being because people become greedy as soon as the opportunity to capitalize on something arises.
Would there have been other options or would Lisbon have fallen apart without foreign investment?
No, it wouldn’t have disintegrated, but it would have taken longer. People came to Lisbon and loved it, but instead of loving and enjoying it, they made an enterprise out of it. It is very important that the government now prevents the passport trade, at least in the larger Portuguese cities, and uses it to upgrade the rural regions.
Keyword: Airbnb. The vacation rentals are eating away at the city like a crab.
Airbnb is a great example. In the beginning there was this glorious idea to share your apartment with each other and to earn some extra money. It has now become a huge investment and companies are buying tens of thousands of homes for a profit. The idea has mauled itself and will therefore resolve itself. The European rules are getting better and better and the massive, negative effects can be seen in the cities. The city of Lisbon has now leased 1,000 Airbnb apartments to rent to Portuguese people for a low price. In my opinion, the city is doinga great job here. We need fewer but better regulations. I think the number of rules should be divided by ten. Too many regulations take up too much freedom and diminish our imagination.
How was Lisbon 30 years ago?
It is irrelevant. We cannot live in the past. We have to use them to shape our future. When I arrived there might be one art gallery. Today there are over 30. Lisbon is alive and well. The city’s culinary offerings are overwhelming and people with great skills open businesses. The human diversity is breathtaking. This is mainly due to the Portuguese and their history, which is fed by foreigners. I love Lisbon and I love Lisbon because of the Portuguese. Portuguese are a resilient people.
So it is a romantic misconception to think that everything was better in the past?
Yes. Every time, every generation faces its own challenges. All you have to do is read books. Problems have existed for as long as there have been people and people keep developing. If you look at European cities since the 19th century, you see a fundamental change, every 30-40 years. They are constantly edifying themselves. That is, people are edifying them. There are countries in which over 80 percent of the population live in cities. These cities are growing at breakneck speed, faster than countries. What I see critical about it, however, is its diversity. We come to a point where human and natural diversity is not a variable of a formula. In Lisbon, in some streets, you can find a souvenir shop every twenty meters where a Pakistani sells Portuguese flags produced in China. Tourists see tourists. There are ten tourists for every resident and grocery stores are dwindling in the city center. When I bought Palácio Belmonte, there was a baker and a butcher at the Castelo. I bought 25 apartments, restored them and gave them back to the tenant. With a rent of 20, 25 euros and the old tenants still pay that amount today.
Why
Because I wanted to preserve the ecosystem that surrounds this house.
Did you succeed?
No, today the butchers and bakers have also become souvenir shops. What can I do? It is a free country and the people react in their own interest. It is up to the government to intervene and that is what they do. But action takes time. Ten million people think faster than government, and it takes years for a government to have concrete figures for certain developments. It’s very late, but not too late to do better. In addition, many decisions for Lisbon are made in Brussels. When Portugal joined the European Union in 1986, the country had a negative balance of payments of one billion euros. Twenty years later it was a negative 26 billions.
What was it really about?
It is about increasing consumption, and importing goods in order to meet the increasing demand that was stimulated by the foreign capital in flow, i.e. borrowing and European funds. That was one of the basic premise of joining the EU, not without calculation, because where did most of the products come from? From Germany and France.
Both countries still use this advantage today and sell their products in southern European countries. An example: up until two years ago, Portugal imported yearly 18 million euros equivalent of frozen pizzas from Germany.
Why?
Free trade, yes, but I just can’t accept that.
Does that make you sad?
Yes, it makes me sad, but I won’t cry because of it. It makes me sad that handicrafts have no value today and that Portuguese craftsmanship and tradition have not been protected for a long time. Now you can see their value againand the city takes measures to protect them. There are now over a thousand traditional stores. They receive a rental guarantee and subsidies to keep their business going until they can fly on their own. It took a while, but it happens. Long before that, I tried to counteract this development with two specific concepts.
What were those concepts?
One project was to pen facilities and and make real estate available to artists and craftsmen in the city. At the time the city owned a lot of properties and I wanted some of them to be rented out for a very low price so that they could settle down, not be bothered all the time with invoices and create. Many of them were in Alfama. It was a risky project. The city refused.
What a shame, and what was the other project?
It consisted in a collaboration with the then Environment Minister Assunção Cristas. We tried to bring the Setúbal region down to a sustainable common denominator. Life beyond growth.
UN recognizes that GDP is an unsufficient guide for safeguarding the well being of people or our future. The UN suggests: “A more inclusive, equitable and balance approach to economic growth that promote sustainable development, poverty eradication, happiness and well being of all peoples.” A society innovative, inspiring, creative and collaborative. Building local, scaling global.
We worked on it for two years and found that (just one small example) companies like Coca-Cola and Portucel were exploiting the region by using groundwater worth 80 million euros a year without paying for it. To understand, 18 millions is the sum the inhabitants pay for their water. On paper, of course, these companies were flawless. They even had internal representatives who prepared reports and handed out a pure production conscience.
It's irony.
Yes that’s it. Banks shouldn’t give loans to people who don’t use it to drive sustainable projects. Every project must be carefully examined. You could see that in the Setúbal project. If you invest properly, a price can be reduced by ten times what an investment costs us today.
We worked with the Instituto Superior Técnico for this study and many other specialists, I financed the program myself. In the end, the World Bank rejected it. The administration of Setúbal at the time said that they did not want to play the game of a guinea pig meaning they did not want to take the risk to be alone in the world developing such a concept. More said, I was crazy, which is what I was. Today, however, half the world works with similar concepts. Energy efficiency of houses, subsidized conversions for climate-neutral living, double glazing, insulated roofs, simple things cleaning the grounds and waters and farming for their own use. Being too early with your ideas is a real problem. If you are too early, you are nobody and nobody listens to you.
You say so without regret.
Maybe I just wasn’t good enough to get my way. I am not a politician. I was offered a long time ago a seat at the French Parliament, but I refused. It’s a great job, very complex and demanding, and as I told you already I’m a lazy man. Working seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, that’s not my concept of life. Time is the most precious thing we have. However, I did my best. I still receive politicians and economists to discuss problems with them today. I would be happy to recommend this book to you: The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. It doesn’t take much to change anything. The only important thing is to realize that the earth is a wonderful ecosystem, the Garden of Eden.
Before committing to social and environmental sustainability, you worked for the dark side of power. Why do you say so?
No I worked for a great company and was very happy to learn so much.
Was this time important to see through your opponents and their ways of thinking?
I dealt with corporate mergers and acquisitions. Five years for the largest privately owned company in the United States, five years of pleasure. I helped in a very pragmatic way to buy trains, hotels, mines, land, more and more and more, until I realized what I was doing had no end. It was all a long time ago and it feels like a different life. But from that moment on, I became intensely involved with sustainable topics and traveled the world to understand how the Earth was working. I did a psychoanalysis two or three times a week for ten years in order to understand myself better. Then we founded DaST -Design a Sustainable Tomorrow, in order to strengthen our commitment to a thermodynamic equilibrium. So to answer the question: yes, I think it was necessary to understand what is going nowhere and I committed myself to try to do better. What’s wrong: the price contained in the accounting system is incorrect. It is too cheap because environmental costs and all other costs are not measured according to their real values. We use an accounting system that dates back to the 18th century, adapted and refined, yes, but from the 18th century. If one were to integrate thermodynamic laws into the accounting system, bananas from Peru would certainly be more expensive than those from Madeira. Our economy runs at the expense of nature and exploits its resources. These negative effects are not included in the price of logistics. Globalization has always existed, but the globalization that we have seen since the end of World War II is extremely aggressive. Today there are around 40,000 listed global companies; at the end of the 1980s there were twice as many. What you have to understand is that the added value of these 80,000 companies, on the stock exchange, was 20 percent of the global GNP at the time. Today 40,000 companies achieve over 75 percent. This means that we have few companies that know how to produce everything we need for a low price.
What are the consequences?
That we all use the same products that are manufactured by the same 40,000 companies and that the inner cities of London, Paris and Madrid are almost indistinguishable. Portugal is a small country with few inhabitants, more than 60 percent of whom live in the country’s four large cities. It is not good for such a country to receive tourists in very large numbers. In my opinion, Portugal does not value its qualities enough. Above all, the human qualities of the population, the diversity of its landscape. The low-cost model is a nice principle, but should no longer be a priority in Portugal. The country has to raise its price to limit tourism.
For me, who can hardly pay their rent and like to eat in simple pubs, does that mean that I will soon no longer be able to afford my liter of red wine?
No, it shouldn’t refer to rent or tascas or the price of wine. It should be applied to vacation rentals. Imagine there are companies like booking.com that receive 10-20 percent for every booking made through their website. 80 percent of all hotel rooms in Portugal go through these websites. It’s well-intentioned software that compares things, but the percentage is too high for a hotelier who has invested a lot of money. But what is even more serious: these companies do not pay taxes in Portugal.
The most expensive suite in your house costs 3000 euros a night. How is such a price justified?
The price of a room per night should be one percent of the total investment, but that’s not the point. Airplanes, which pollute a lot, have to increase their tariffs so that the tourist crowds are reduced to people who really want to visit this place and not just see through cell phone cameras. You have a ten by four centimeter view of the land.
Is that supposed to be traveling?
This is no longer traveling, I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry for being rude, but that’s how it is.
What's rude about that?
Well, it is rude to say to limit tourism to people who can afford it and are willing to grapple with the culture and history of this country or even want to become part of a community. I don’t think that people who fly to Lisbon on a budget of ten euros a day can improve the city. You just destroy it.
So tourists need better training?
No, you couldn’t do that. However, the answer to this question can be traced back to school education. You have to do it another way, through the rules of the economy. Lisbon is a landscape and a landscape is what? Just an asset? You have buildings, churches, museums, but above all you have people who live here and the bad thing is that when these people who belong to a landscape disappear, the landscape disappears too. Accordingly, landscapes are not just assets. They live through their ecosystem. If you only put foreigners in this landscape who stay for five days, the landscape becomes an empty story.
What do you recommend to a Lisbon visitor?
Go, go, go, have lunch in a tasca, go on, go, go. That’s all.
So it’s not about how many places you see, but how much you can see in one place and what can you bring to the country.
Allow me one last question: the mood of the population is resigned. Is it corrector is it part of a Portuguese mentality, is there hope?
Oh yes, a lot. It will be possible. It will take a while, but you can do it. The young generation is great. I’m very old, but surrounded by young people, students or people like you. They don’t look for power, they look for something true.
