Riad Solange

The Riad Solange does not book like the others, because it is not lived like the others. It is a small five-room house in the Kasbah, but its subject is not the visit of Marrakech: it is wellness. The house offers yoga classes several times a week, meditation, sound baths, massages and treatments à la carte, up to ayurvedic sessions in some seasons. You come here to slow down, in a deliberately stripped-back aesthetic, bare tadelakt, natural materials, potted cacti and olive trees on the roof, light-years from the zellige-loaded riad.

The welcome goes with it, and it is personified. The house is run by its hostess, Helene, whom travellers cite ahead of the rest for her presence and her care, which earns the address a top welcome score. The roof is the heart of the place: a tiered terrace, under shade sails, where the house breakfast is taken, where the classes are given, and where you settle in the evening. It is the kind of place that makes an address stand out, and that explains the very high score it gathers. To extend the spirit, the house sits in the line of the city’s wellness addresses.

You have to read the small print, though. First the pool: there is none in the house, only one, indicated a quarter of an hour away, outside the walls. Then the audience: the riad is presented as adults-only on the platforms, but its own site also welcomes children from twelve years old, a contradiction to clear at booking. Finally the comfort: the score is very high, but on a still modest review count, and a few travellers, under the praise, flag tired bedding and air conditioning a little short on hot nights. The price, itself, reads mostly in two-night wellness stays. The room-only rate is on request.

For two travellers looking for a pause rather than an outings base, yoga, calm and a present hostess, the Riad Solange is a singular and endearing address of the Kasbah. For anyone wanting a pool, a big house or simply to sleep near the monuments without the rest, the very wellness spirit of the house, and its lack of a basin, will make it a wrong choice.