A hotel from the inside

The twenty-fifth entry is a zona de hóspedes and the one after it is a zona de serviço; between them they divide the whole building. Portuguese names each half after the people who belong in it — the guests in one, the staff in the other — and the grey door of the example sentence is the seam. English cuts the same building at the same seam and took its words from the theatre. « Front of house » is everything the audience sees: in a playhouse the foyer, the bar and the auditorium; in a hotel the lobby, the lounge, the restaurant and the desk. « Back of house » is everything behind that line — the kitchens, the laundry, the linen store, the staff lift, the corridor full of trolleys. The metaphor is still alive, and it carries a rule with it: anybody standing front of house is on stage and behaves accordingly, and the performance stops at the door. So a zona de serviço is « back of house » and never « the service area », which in English is a place to buy petrol on a motorway.