Riad Noos Noos

The house is consistent from floor to roof. A red-and-white checker runs everywhere: it edges the patio basin, it lines the hammam vault, it patterns the terrace tables. The patio is set around a long ornamental basin, papyrus in planters, brass candlesticks, rope-edged. The nine rooms, including two suites, are spread over the two patios and the terrace. One of them is bright yellow, painted ceiling, pierced brass chandelier, zellige floor. On the roof, masonry benches, a minaret opposite whose top carries a stork nest, and the Atlas at the back. You take breakfast and dine here.

But what you keep first, here, is the welcome, and it has nothing anonymous. The comments cite the whole team by first name: Aimad, Hussein, Fatima, Simo, Fati who runs the kitchen, and Laurent who runs the house. This is collective work, praised on hundreds of reviews as one of the warmest of the medina - and that is exactly what you come looking for in a nine-room riad rather than in a two-hundred-room hotel.

The house lists all its prices, in pounds, on a single page of its site. It is more useful than it seems. Most addresses answer “please enquire”, and the traveller finds out the price of dinner, the hammam or the transfer once on site, when they no longer really have a choice. Here, everything is known before packing, from the massage to the cookery class. The night starts around £111, breakfast and Wi-Fi included.

As for the name: a noss-noss, in Marrakech, is a half-and-half coffee, as much espresso as milk. The house writes it Noos Noos, nowhere claims this reading, and offers no other. It does not say either when it opened or who created it: neither its site nor any source gives a date.

Three caveats, and the first is a correction. There is no pool, contrary to what some platforms show mentioning a “pool view”: the patio basin is decorative, and the confusion probably comes from the billiard room, pool room in English. If you want to swim, this is not the place. Then the Wi-Fi, the only low score of the house at 8.6, which guests describe as fickle in places, a classic of old thick-walled buildings. Finally the bathrooms: in some rooms, the shower and the toilet are only separated by a curtain. Not a hidden flaw, but a reality of a restored riad. Better ask at booking than on arrival.

A word finally on the quarter, because it makes half the stay. The old Jewish quarter lives at its rhythm, between the spice market and the Bahia palace: fewer tourist shops, more people going home. Guests give 9.2 to the location and describe the house as peaceful despite the street’s bustle. At £111 a night, for the medina on foot, a £17 hammam and someone who answers when you ask, there is little to say against, as a couple as in a family, since the house has rooms for four and five people and charges children half-price at table. For anyone dreaming of a basin to swim lengths in, the answer is no, and it is clear.