Lux Vidigal

Lux Vidigal sits halfway up the hillside in Vidigal, the neighbourhood wedged between Leblon and São Conrado that spent most of its history known only as a favela and is now just as often described as having the best view in Rio de Janeiro. The apartment is two storeys, seven hundred square feet, built for two people and a window that outperforms almost everything else in the city.

The building has a gated entrance and a daytime doorman, no lift, and a third-floor walk-up that matters more on the way in with luggage than on the way out. Bruno, the host, has run it since 2015; it holds a 4.86 rating across 115 stays on Airbnb, and the reviews return to the same two subjects — the view, and how quickly he answers.

The space

The ground floor is one open room built around a sliding glass wall: living area, dining corner, and a full kitchen with cobalt-blue lower cabinets, a marble backsplash, a five-burner gas range, and a French-door refrigerator. A Los Angeles-based interior designer furnished it with a restored 1920s Louis XV chair, French-imported 1920s bamboo chairs, and antique Brazilian pieces rather than the usual rental basics. A 43-inch smart TV hangs on an articulating arm; guests rarely watch it for long, because the glass wall behind it opens straight onto the Atlantic.

Upstairs is one bedroom: a queen bed against floor-to-ceiling windows, air conditioning, blackout curtains, and a second, smaller balcony that catches the morning sun. The bathroom shares that same open floor rather than sitting behind its own door — a standalone tub filled by a rooftop solar heater, deep blue Portuguese-style tile, brass fixtures, and a separate walk-in shower. It is, by a wide margin, the most photographed corner of the apartment, and the reason shows up in nearly every review.

The setting

Vidigal has been pacified since 2011, and the property's own account of the neighbourhood holds up against outside reporting: a working-class hillside community of artists, expats, and residents who have been there for decades, with markets, pharmacies, and restaurants built into the same streets as the apartment blocks. It is also, by a long distance, the best-positioned favela in Rio for a view, which is why it draws visitors who could stay anywhere else in the city and choose this instead.

The beach is four minutes downhill on foot. Leblon is roughly three minutes by car, Ipanema about ten. The Dois Irmãos hiking trailhead is a fifteen-minute walk or a short moto-taxi ride, and the trail ends at the panorama that shows up on half of Rio's postcards. Santos Dumont, the domestic airport, is 20 to 30 minutes away; Galeão, the international one, runs anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour and a half depending on traffic.

Who it suits

This is a two-person apartment in the most literal sense — one queen bed, no sofa bed, no real way to fit in a third guest. It works for a couple who would rather wake up somewhere specific than somewhere safe, and who don't mind a walk-up building and a hillside street to reach it. It works less well for anyone who needs step-free access, or for a family trying to stretch it past two people and a view. Longer stays get real consideration too — the host has taken in writers and remote workers for a month or more at a stretch, which is long enough to stop noticing the stairs.