Villa Makassar

It takes one sentence to place the Villa Makassar, and it is enough: it is the only Art Deco palace in the Marrakech medina. Where all the quarter’s houses decline the same vocabulary, zellige, tadelakt, sculpted plaster, this one has stepped aside and replayed the 1920s and 1930s. Macassar ebony columns and veneers, which give the house its name, tubular armchairs in cream leather, lacquers, shagreen, parchment, dark chevron wood floors. Not a surface decor: the materials are those of the period, dear and rare, and the whole holds from the façade to the tap.

The house was born of a passion, that of Fouad Graidia, a collector who gathered the furniture and objects over years before restoring the two joined riads, about thirteen hundred square metres. The ten rooms each carry the name of a figure of the period, from Ruhlmann to Mondrian, and the stance goes to the end: each room has its furniture, its colours, its materials. You do not pick a room category, you pick a universe, which is a way of travelling in itself.

The rest matches an address of this standing. A full spa, with hammam, indoor jacuzzi, massage room and chromotherapy, and on the roof a hot tub doubled with the house restaurant, Mediterranean and Oriental cooking with a changing menu, served facing the Kasbah terraces. A small pool, billed as heated, lets you cool off in the house. The location, against the royal palace, places the Saadian Tombs and Jemaa el-Fna about ten minutes on foot, in a sector calmer than the middle of the souks.

Two nuances, before booking. The first has to do with the score: it is high, but on a still modest review count, and a few travellers report upkeep points and uneven water pressure, not rare in an old house loaded with fittings. The second has to do with the commercial vocabulary: the villa presents itself as 5-star and claims a place in a British press ranking of the best Art Deco hotels. Star ratings have nothing official in Morocco for a riad, and the ranking is a distinction the house itself puts forward. Both say a positioning most of all, not a guarantee.

For two travellers who have done the round of Moroccan riads and are looking for something else, an inhabited collector’s piece, an owned singularity a few steps from the Saadian Tombs, the Villa Makassar has no equivalent in the medina. For anyone who wants precisely the zellige, the fountain and the patio planted with an orange tree, the very imagery of the riad, you have to look elsewhere: here, you sleep in another century.