Ryad Dyor

The Ryad Dyor joins two medina houses at the end of a derb of Sidi Ben Slimane, at the north corner of the old town. That is the principle of the Moroccan house - turned to its courts, it keeps its light for inside and offers to the street only a blind wall and a studded door. Sidi Ben Slimane is a residential quarter, off the commercial pressure of the souks, set around the mausoleum of the saint who gives it its name. You are north of the medina, a quarter of an hour on foot from Jemaa el-Fna and the souks, the same to reach the Kasbah quarter through the inside of the ramparts.

Each keeps its basin in green zellige, under orange trees and hanging brass lanterns, with daybeds and low armchairs set on the paving: you take the cool in the shade when the medina bakes outside, and you can immerse at hot hours. The rooms and suites, ten in all, open onto these courts and on the floors, each in a different register - hand-rubbed tadelakt, painted cedar or exposed reed ceilings, sculpted headboards, furniture hunted between Morocco, Europe and Asia. The finest suites push the decor to a stone-cut bathtub and a formal painted ceiling. The bathrooms are private, air conditioning standard, Wi-Fi included. On the ground floor, a sitting room dressed in ochre under a chased brass chandelier stands as the evening room, sheltered from the lane’s noise.

The terrace, on the top level, serves breakfast in the morning - continental, or adapted to vegan, halal and gluten-free diets - and you go back up at sundown for the view: the medina rooftops, the Koutoubia, and on a clear day the Atlas range, often snowed in winter. A hammam and a few treatments, scrub or massage, are taken on site at a supplement, and the house arranges a Moroccan table on booking or a cookery class on request. Travellers give it 9.3 on Booking on nearly three hundred reviews, with an 8.9 mention for couples’ stays, which says the address’s profile. For anyone after the same register, the quarter has no shortage of houses run in this spirit: see the other medina riads with pool.

That leaves who it fits. The first caveat has to do with the basins: what is called the pool here is two zellige patio water points, good to cool off but not to swim lengths, and the water is not heated - a welcome cool bath in summer, less tempting in winter. Access goes on foot through lanes sometimes crowded with carts and mopeds, there is no private parking, and the house is climbed by stairs, no lift: big cases have to be hauled by hand over several levels. Suites and high season quickly push the bill past the entry price. For a couple wanting a careful house in calm, two basin patios, a hammam and a terrace with a view from around £128 a night, the address lands right and is well placed. For anyone travelling in a large family, expecting a pool where you swim or hotel services with a lift, better look at the big garden houses of the Palmeraie. Here, you pay first for a quiet quarter and a held decor in the middle of the old town.