Moroccan style

At Café Arabe in the Medina of Marrakech, Moroccan style cocoons you in vivid carpeted, cushioned interiors ...

and cool blue terraces and courtyards painted in intense Majorelle blue ...

Marrakech's exoticism and mystery, its sense of being a 'place out of time' as Yves St Laurent called it, make it a place where Western fantasies have played out for decades.

It was the Rolling Stones favourite destination in the 60s, from the first time they rolled down there in Keith's blue Bentley ...

Image source 1, 2, 3

Keith Richards (left), in Moroccan sheepskin and jewellery, chilling with cigarette and cannabis pipe on a roof terrace in Tangier; Brian Jones with Anita Pallenberg (centre), photographed in Morocco by Cecil Beaton, shortly before Keith claimed Anita for himself; Talitha Getty and husband Paul, photographed (right) on their roof terrace for Vogue by Patrick Lichfield, were recalled by Yves St Laurent as "lying under a roof of stars in Marrakech, beautiful and damned". 

YSL had his own love affair with Maroc ...

Reclining in djellaba and one of his many Morocco-inspired drawings. Source: Une Passion Marocaine, Pierre Bergé

Lanterns and carved wood front door at Café Arabe

Café Arabe, 184 Rue Mouassine, Marrakech, is one for the address book ...
Thank you Elizabeth Wix for this and so many other great recommendations!

Maroccan style ranges from intense colour to cool silver and carved ebony ...

... water and orange trees are the inevitable backdrop.

There's style in spades at La Mamounia - Marrakech's legendary hotel, a place of dreams ...

Entrance to La Mamounia

Winston Churchill, who had a twenty five year love affair with Morocco (he declared it 'the loveliest spot in the world' and Marrakech 'the Paris of the Sahara'), was a regular at La Mamounia, where he wrote and painted watercolours of the landscapes from its balconies. 

Churchill's granddaughter, Celia Sandys, recollects that after a wartime conference in 1943 with President Roosevelt in Casablanca, Churchill insisted to Roosevelt "You cannot come all this way to North Africa without seeing Marrakech". 

A few days later the two were gazing at the sunset over the purple Atlas Mountains. 
Roosevelt, having been carried from his wheelchair up to the rooftop, reclining on a divan, was so moved by the scene that he turned to Churchill saying "I feel like a sultan: you may kiss my hand, my dear."

Photos above all taken in the gardens of La Mamounia
Visit their website here for completely spectacular views of the hotel and its gardens

Tiles are at the heart of Moroccan style. Zillij date back to the old Moorish tradition of ceramic tile-making using geometrical mosaics (introduced to Portugal and Spain by the Moors ... the word azulejo from the Arabic zellige meaning polished stone) ...

Collage of tiles photographed at Musée de Marrakech, La Mamounia hotel, Riyad el Cadi, Bahia Palace, Medersa Ben Youssef

Marrakech is known as the City of Ochre or Red City.

If you love Moroccan style, take a look at this fabulous Dutch online source of products inspired by the Red City and the Sahara - El Ramla Hamla (meaning the red sand), which I'm mad about. And then look at their blog here about living between Amsterdam and Marrakech, with stunning photography and design.

School of dreams: Medersa Ben Youssef

For me perhaps the most beautiful of all the places we visited in Marrakech was the Medersa  Ben Youssef ...

a 16th century theological school and one of the biggest and most well known madrasas in North Africa.

Pupils came here from many different countries to study law, science and the Qu'ran in these  extraordinarily beautiful surroundings. 

A large central courtyard with a tiled pool (above) has columned arcades on two sides, elaborately decorated with tiles and stone carvings ...

The dormitory quarters on the upper level open through keyhole windows (above) to the courtyard below.

Imagine studying in a classroom that looks like this ...

with this the view above your head ...

Younger daughter imagined herself a student here, framed in an ornately carved alcove ... 

The sleeping quarters upstairs are a maze of little rooms that are rather like monks' cells. Most are tiny and dark, and perhaps would not have been much fun to inhabit. 

A couple of the larger, windowed rooms have been recreated with original writing desks, books, candles and the eating and drinking utensils that students would have brought with them - a tagine, water pot and tea tray ...

Detail of the massed zellij (mosaic tile-work) that surround the courtyard areas ...

In winter sunshine, the central courtyard leads the eye,  through horseshoe arches-within -arches, to the prayer hall at its far end, with the mihrab (prayer niche).  Can there be a more beautiful style of architecture?

Students passed through this peaceful, meditative place for 450 years until it was closed as a school in the 1960s. With up to 900 students at a time, I wondered what their thoughts would have been walking into this courtyard for the first time and what they took away from their time here.

The Medersa Ben Youssef is next door to the Musée de Marrakech and the Koubba Almoravid (annexe to the Ben Youssef mosque), all worth seeing.

Majorelle Gardens: a Moroccan passion

The Jardin Majorelle was the creation of a French artist, Jacques Majorelle, who settled in Marrakech during the First World War. Majorelle acquired a 9 acre property of palm groves just outside of the city, and set about creating a botanical garden.

 With a painter's eye he designed it around walls, fountains and pots in bold primary blue and yellow ...

... its dominant feature this intense cobalt  blue which Jacques Majorelle developed and patented as Majorelle Blue

Majorelle lived and painted here, while opening his garden to the public ... 

which is how French coutourier Yves St Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé discovered it.

In his beautiful book Une Passion Marocaine, which I bought in the garden's bookshop, Pierre Bergé describes how he and Yves fell in love with Marrakech from the moment of their first visit there in 1966, which ended with them flying back to France with the signed deeds to their first property, the Dar (villa) El Hanch.

Image source: amazon, where the book is available

The book is  a treat - an intimate memoir of their years part-living in Morocco, hand-written by Bergé and illustrated with his personal photos of a young and very beautiful Yves and their circle of friends there, and Yves' drawings and paintings ...

Collage of images from Une Passion Marocaine by Pierre Bergé

Maybe partly because it reminded him of his birthplace in North Africa (he was born in Algeria), Morocco came to be a huge source of inspiration to St Laurent, who attributed its influence to his most beautiful collections. 

He and Bergé were frequent visitors to the Majorelle garden, and witnessed its gradual decline and neglect in the years following Jacques Majorelle's death. When they heard of plans to sell it to a property developer who intended to destroy the garden to build a large hotel, they embarked on the seemingly impossible - halting the scheme and becoming owners of the Majorelle garden.

The couple moved in to the Villa Oasis, Majorelle's villa adjacent to the gardens and set about restoring it to his original vision, redonner vie ...

Image source, from Une Passion Marocaine
Pierre Bergé describes this photo as having particular meaning for him as the only existing photo of himself and YSL together in the Majorelle Gardens

Yves in the Jardin Majorelle. Did he choose the colour of that jacket deliberately, I wonder, to contrast with the Majorelle blue?
Image source

Visually, the garden is unique ... the intense Majorelle blue and splashes of bright bougainvillea stand out against a lush background of multiple shades of green: the garden is planted with hundreds of species of palms, aloes, succulents - all plants that thrive in Marrakech's arid desert climate ...

Water features everywhere in the garden give it the feel of a cool oasis

The café in a shaded courtyard has more muted colours ...

... but it was that intense blue that I kept being drawn to ...

Majorelle's blue was inspired originally by his love of the colour of Moroccan tiles, windows and Berber clothing.

It has an intensity that might seem garish in grey northern climates but is stunning in sun-saturated North Africa ...

The artist's original studio was transformed by St Laurent and Bergé into a museum of Berber art and clothing

Yves loved this place so much that after his death in 2008, his ashes were scattered here -
 in the rose garden of the Villa Oasis  where the couple had lived - and Pierre had this simple memorial erected, tucked away in a secluded corner of the garden.

The Roman column was brought from their house in Tangier and mounted on stone painted in Moroccan ochre

Bergé has since donated the garden to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves St Laurent, a public institution that now looks after it.

For better photos than mine (and taken minus the crowds of tourists that flock here!), see Jeffrey Bale's post here

Come to the kasbah: ruins and palaces

This way to the kasbah ...

Bab Agnaou is one of the nineteen ancient gates of Marrakech. It leads to the royal kasbah, where you will find El Badi Palace.

Translating as "the incomparable palace", El Badi was just that when it was built in the 16th century by a Sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur. Today it's a vast and atmospheric ruin.

 

Walking around, you're struck first by the massive scale of it, and then your mind boggles as you try to imagine its original richness and opulence …

360 rooms decorated in Italian marble, Sudanese gold, ivory, onyx, semi-precious stones and intricately-carved cedar wood ...

... a central hall flanked by fifty huge columns, a 90 metre long pool and four smaller pools surrounded by sunken orange gardens and fountains

Its scale and opulence was so overwhelming that it took 25 years to construct … and only a century later, a full 12 years to destroy: not by enemies, but by a later sultan, who systematically stripped El Badi of all its precious materials, to create his own palace elsewhere ...

leaving behind a great ochre ruin of centuries old sandstone walls ... a palace where storks have taken up home ...

and stand guard on the ramparts

They say that El Badi was built with the already long-existing Alhambra (in Granada, Spain) in mind, though you have to imagine this. But at Bahia Palace, a short distance away, the comparison with the Alhambra (see here for an earlier post) becomes obvious ...

The Bahia is a newer and better preserved 19th century palace and gardens in the medina along the edge of Mellah, the Jewish Quarter ...

Built as a home for the Sultan's personal harem ...

... it has a series of walled gardens and courtyards with fountains, planted with orange, cypress, jasmine and banana trees.

A central tiled courtyard here is surrounded by a series of rooms, the size of each said to have depended on the importance or favour of each concubine

Craftsmen were brought from Fez to work on the details … arches, carved and painted ceilings, intricate stucco plasterwork and patterned tile mosaics. A seamless interplay of gardens, light and water make up the balance of this fabulous Arab-Andalusian architecture.

Elizabeth Wix, who is lucky enough to have lived in Marrakech once, pointed us in the direction of these amazing palaces and much more besides - thank you, Elizabeth! - and reminded me that the Bahia was the setting in the remake of Brideshead Revisited where Charles Ryder goes to find a sick Sebastian Flyte. Do see her blog The House in Marrakesh and her wonderful posts on the Bahia here.