How a Death Doula Throws a Dinner Party

As a child, Rebecca Illing would spend vacations with her parents and brother, Alex, at Paço da Glória, a gothic mansion turned guesthouse in Portugal’s lush Minho region. A 40-minute drive north of Porto, then the family’s hometown, the property is surrounded by dense cork oak woodland, and Illing loved getting lost on its grounds and exploring its winding corridors. Parts of the house date to the 14th century, and it grew haphazardly from there: An imposing dark gray stone facade topped with medieval-style merlons was added in the 1700s; later, the English peer Lord Peter Pitt Millward reimagined the home in the style of a Baroque palace. In the 1970s, it became a guesthouse under the stewardship of another Briton, Colin Clark, the filmmaker and author of the 2020 memoir “My Week with Marilyn.”

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For the past 21 years, the 10-acre estate — with its bright green lawns and grand granite swimming pool — has been owned by Illing’s family. (Her mother, who met Illing’s father in Porto, had always dreamed of buying the place.) And since 2022, following renovations of the nine guest rooms and the installation of a yoga deck and indoor pool, the property has been run exclusively by Illing herself as a guesthouse of a different sort: one that is, to use her phrase, “grief literate.”

The walls of the main hall are lined with busts of celebrated Frenchmen, statues reportedly put in place by the British aristocrat Lord Peter Pitt Millward, who bought the property at auction in 1932.Credit…Matilde Viegas