Les Deux Tours

Les Deux Tours does not look like a hotel: it is a house, or rather a hamlet of pavilions set in the Palmeraie, fifteen minutes from the medina. The architect Charles Boccara drew it in the 1980s, when the Marrakech palm grove was filling with private residences. He applied his vocabulary: exposed earthen brick, vaults and domes, arcades, patios and pools, closer to the Arab-Andalusian medinas than the great hotel. The two pisé towers that give the place its name rise at the end of a garden, a survivor of that stance where the architecture comes before the comfort. You sleep here in a signed work, which is rare, and it shows from the entrance drive. Boccara, born in Marrakech in 1936 and trained in Paris, marked the city with several of these guesthouses. Les Deux Tours remains the best-known, and the one that most directly inspired the riad-hotel wave that followed.

The estate holds 44 rooms and suites across independent pavilions, scattered through three hectares of Andalusian gardens: planted paths, fountains, orange trees, ochre walls. Most rooms open onto a patio or a terrace. Some have a fireplace, a dome to sleep under, sometimes a private plunge pool. Volumes are tall, floors in tadelakt and zellige, bathrooms often striking - one is fully tiled in black and white marble under white vaults, with a double basin and a built-in bath. Rooms come in several categories, from the double up to the largest suites, one of which carries the architect’s name. The pavilion layout means you rarely cross a neighbour: you walk across the garden to reach the pool or the restaurant, and you head home as into a small house of your own. It is the opposite of the corridor hotel, and it is the point of the place. Furniture mixes salvaged pieces, amber-glass chandeliers and Moroccan fabrics, without the showy set-dressing of recent palaces: you are in someone’s home, not in a window display.

The park is built around a heated pool, lined by a terrace in the shade of the trees where you have lunch at La Pergola, the daytime table set at the water’s edge. In the evening, Le Salammbô serves Moroccan and French cooking drawn from the house’s organic kitchen garden, in the room or under the arcades depending on the season. Breakfast is taken in the room, in the garden or on your own terrace - a basket of pastries, fresh fruit, pressed juices. For treatments, Les Bains des Deux Tours gather hammam, scrub and massages in a marble setting, open to residents by appointment. Add a bar, a TV lounge and a shuttle to the centre, offered on request against a fee. For calm and the hammam, the house plays in the same court as other addresses in town built around the spa, with an architect’s signature on top.

That leaves what you want. The Palmeraie is not the city: you do not walk down to the souks, each outing is planned by car, taxi or shuttle, and the quarter, made of enclosed estates, lacks street life. Reckon fifteen minutes by road during the day, more at peak hours, and a separate transport budget for each medina escape. The flip side of the original charm is the age of the house: pavilions and their fittings show their forty years in places, and this is not the fault-free machinery of a new palace. It is the price of an address with a history and an author. Travellers still rate it well (9.3 on Booking, on nearly 800 reviews), with a special mention from couples, praising the welcome and the setting most of all. From around £153 a night in low season, and above from March to May, you pay first for a garden, a silence and the hand of an architect - not the standing of a city-centre 5-star. For a slow trip for two, off the buzz, it is a fine option. For anyone who wants to head out every night in the old town, a medina address will suit better.