Hair and makeup for your wedding at Lisbon Wine Hotel

Lisbon Wine Hotel is a small four-star property on Rua Portas de Santo Antão, the pedestrian street of restaurants that runs up from Restauradores, a few minutes on foot from Rossio. It has around nineteen rooms, a garden, a bar and a restaurant. It is a place to stay and to get ready rather than a country estate with a ceremony lawn.

That is a useful thing to be. A large share of Lisbon weddings happen somewhere else, at a quinta outside the city or a palace on the Sintra hill, and the party gets ready in town and drives out. Being five minutes from Rossio means the artist reaches you easily and the cars leave from the middle of the city rather than from a suburb.

Rooms in a small central Lisbon hotel are compact rather than vast, and this one is in a historic street where buildings are deep and windows face either the street or the garden. Neither is a problem. What the appointment needs is a plug, an upright chair rather than an armchair, and a metre of space beside a window or a lamp.

The artist brings her own kit and her own mirror light, which is what makes a compact room workable. A desk or a dressing table helps, but is not required. Nothing is fixed to the walls and the room is left as it was found.

If the party is larger than two or three people, a small hotel room becomes the limiting factor rather than the schedule. It is worth saying how many people are getting ready in that room when you enquire.

The schedule for a wedding morning at a central hotel is not built around the ceremony hour. It is built around the hour the cars leave, which for a Sintra or Cascais venue can be an hour and a half or more before the ceremony, and more again on a summer Saturday.

So we ask for two numbers rather than one: the ceremony time and the departure time. Everything works backwards from the departure. As a planning figure, a bride's hair and makeup together takes about two hours, and each additional person takes about 45 minutes per service.

The advantage of a central location is that guests, mothers and bridesmaids are often within a short walk rather than across the city. When several people getting hair or makeup are in the same building or the same neighbourhood, one artist can cover far more of them in a morning, because none of the time goes into travel.

If that describes your wedding, say so early. It is the difference between a realistic group booking and a schedule that only works on paper.