Dar Les Cigognes

Dar Les Cigognes is not one more medina riad, and that has to do first with who put it back on its feet. The house, an old merchant’s home hidden behind a discreet door facing the royal palace ramparts, puts forward a restoration signed by Charles Boccara, one of the architects who, in the 1980s and 1990s, helped reinvent the charm riad in Marrakech. It shows everywhere: in the plaster vaults, the bed alcoves, the tadelakt aged to the point of fresco, the two patios set around their zellige fountains. This is the vocabulary of a real old dwelling, not a plated decor.

The house is run by the Sanssouci Collection group, based in Marrakech since the early 2000s, which operates two neighbouring riads and a cookery school. The house presents this school as having been on television. More to the point, it also welcomes those not staying on site, and it gives the address a reason to exist beyond the room night. You learn to make a tajine or a pastilla in a real house kitchen, which beats most of the workshops built for groups.

Eleven rooms and suites, then, spread over the two joined riads, each in its register: vaults, orientalist canvases, velvet curtains, alcoves. Small, upper-tier, and the service follows. You take breakfast and, in the evening, a dinner whose menu changes daily, served in the house or on the terrace. A hammam, a jacuzzi and massages round out the house. The location, in the south medina facing the royal palace, puts the Bahia palace two steps away and Jemaa el-Fna seven minutes on foot, while keeping the calm of a street that is not a tourist corridor.

That leaves nuance, because the house’s reputation runs a little ahead of it. On TripAdvisor, where the sample is broad, it holds a solid 4 out of 5 without topping the city ranking: a good address, not an exceptional one. The recurring reproaches are two: the noise, which the very structure of a riad open on its patios explains in part, and the upkeep of some bathrooms, which betrays the age of the restoration. It is, indeed, value for money that travellers rate the lowest, even if the address stays, compared to other houses of this standing, rather reasonable.

The verdict holds in one line: you come here for an author’s house, a story and a table, accepting that an old dwelling has its creaks. Those wanting the impeccable new of a recent boutique hotel will be quieter elsewhere. Here, you pay for a signature and a past, not for last year’s refurbishment.